lorraine's life
Storyboard Text
- Lorraine Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930, at Provident Hospital on Chicago's South Side. She was the youngest of four children born to Nannie Perry Hansberry and Carl Augustus Hansberry. Her father was the founder of Lake Street Bank, one of Chicago's earliest black-owned banks, as well as a prominent real estate developer.
- Hansberry was born to a real estate broker father and a schoolteacher mother. The NAACP and the Urban League both received big donations from her parents. Hansberry's family moved to a white area in 1938 and was racially profiled by their new neighbors.
- Hansberry became the first in her family to attend a predominately white institution and the first African-American student in campus housing at the University of Wisconsin, where she was a liberal arts major, after graduating from Englewood High School in 1947.
- Lorraine attended Englewood High School in Chicago, where she discovered her passion for drama. She enrolled at the University of Wisconsin but dropped out before finishing her studies. Hansberry arrived to New York in 1950 to pursue a career as a writer after studying painting in Chicago and Mexico.
- She contributed to Paul Robeson's progressive magazine Freedom, which introduced her to other literary and political teachers like W.E.B. DuBois and Freedom editor Louis Burnham. She met Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish writer who shared her political ideas, at a protest against racial discrimination at New York University. On June 20, 1953, they married at the Hansberrys' house in Chicago.
- In 1962, Hansberry and Nemiroff separated, although they continued to collaborate. Hansberry was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1964, the same year The Sign on Sidney Brustein's Window was released. On January 12, 1965, she passed away. To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, which began off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre and lasted for eight months after her death, was adapted from a compilation of her work and interviews.
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