the likes of Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley.
“An Evening Thought” can be seen as “a demon-
stration of Jupiter Hammon’s religious capacity at
a time when such capacity remained in open ques-
tion” (Bruce, 38).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barksdale, Richard, and Keneth Kinnamon, eds. Black
Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology.
New York: Macmillan Company, 1972.
Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. The Origins of African Ameri-
can Literature, 1680–1865. Charlottesville: Univer-
sity Press of Virginia, 2001.
Carretta, Vincent, ed. Unchained Voices: An Anthol-
ogy of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World
of the Eighteenth Century. Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 1999.
Robinson, William H., ed. Early Black American Poets.
Dubuque, Iowa: Wm. C. Brown Company, 1969.
Wilfred D. Samuels
Hansberry, Lorraine (1930–1965)
Despite the brevity of playwright, activist, and
feminist Lorraine Vivian Hansberry’s theatri-
cal life, and although only two of her plays were
produced during her lifetime, she remains one of
the most celebrated black playwrights in America.
Breaking the color barrier in the theater, protest-
ing and validating the unfortunate circumstances
of blacks in the United States, Hansberry became
the voice of the people during the most critical era
of racial segregation and the fight for civil rights
in America. She used the stage as her platform to
ignite the social and political consciousness of her
audiences, both black and white.
The youngest of four children, Carl Jr., Perry,
and Mamie, Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930,
in Chicago, Illinois. Her father, Carl A. Hansberry,
Sr., was a prominent real estate broker and the
founder of one of Chicago’s first black banks; her
mother, Nannie Perry Hansberry, was a school-
teacher. Both were activists and natives of the
South. In 1938, when Hansberry was eight years
old, her family purchased a home in one of Chica-
go’s restricted white, middle-class neighborhoods,
where they were subjected to racial segregation
and discrimination. Challenging Chicago’s Jim
Crow housing laws, her father won an antisegrega-
tion case before the Illinois Supreme Court. These
injustices later influenced Hansberry’s plays, espe-
cially A RAISIN IN THE SUN, making her a renowned
pioneer in protest theater.
The Hansberrys sent their children to public
schools to protest against segregation laws. Young
Lorraine attended Betsy Ross Grammar School
and graduated, in 1947, from Englewood High
School, where she excelled in English and history
and was elected president of the debating society.
Upon seeing productions of Howard Richardson
and William Berney’s folk musical, Dark of the
Moon, and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and
Othello, starring Paul Robeson, she was captivated
by the theater. Also, during her high school years
Hansberry’s creative imagination was sparked by
such eminent black luminaries as W. E. B. DUBOIS,
Paul Robeson, LANGSTON HUGHES, Jesse Owens,
and Duke Ellington, who frequented her home.
Hansberry was impressed with Hughes’s poetry
and specifically its reflection and celebration of
black people’s complex lives and their deferred
dreams that sometimes dried up like “a raisin in
the sun.” She would borrow this line for the title
of her first play, A Raisin in the Sun.
Hansberry attended the University of Wis-
consin at Madison, where she spent two years
studying English, drama, art, and stage design,
and was active in the Henry Wallace campaign;
she was elected president of the Young Progres-
sives of America and the Labor Youth League.
During a rehearsal of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and
the Paycock (1924), she was fascinated by the
manner in which the Irish playwright portrayed
the oppressed. In the summer of 1949, Hans-
berry attended the University of Guadalajara’s
art workshop in Ajijic, Mexico, before moving to
New York City in 1950, where she began study-
ing at the New School for Social Research. A year
later, she launched her career as a writer and
worked full time as a reporter for Paul Robeson’s
Freedom, a radical black magazine that provided
her with numerous opportunities to broaden her
understanding of the existing domestic and world226 Hansberry, Lorraine