Lorraine Hansberry's Impact On Society

Lorraine Hansberry, born May 19, 1930, made a very prominent contribution to society in her short lived life. She was born to a middle class family as the youngest of four children. Her father was a successful real estate broker who also founded one of the first Negro banks in Chicago (#1 247). In 1938, Lorraine’s father took a stand against the real estate covenants in Chicago due to the fact that they legally promoted housing discrimination. He chose to move his family into a predominantly white neighborhood to prove his point. The court case led to a lot of hostility from those around the Hansberrys. There was a violent attack on the family’s home by a mob who threw bricks into the house while shouting. Even with this reaction to the family

While in New York, she became a reporter and assistant editor for Paul Robeson’s monthly, Freedom. While at a protest against discrimination at NYU for her reporting job, she met a man by the name of Robert Nemiroff. They married in 1953 and he later became a songwriter and producer. Hansberry is known mainly for her play A Raisin in the Sun, however before she began writing that play, she had written a few unfinished plays as well as a novel or two. Hansberry’s success from A Raisin in the Sun was driven by anger and disappointment in how her race was treated in society. The result of her taking a stand through her production was an award-winning play which made way as “the first Broadway play by a black women and the longest-running black play in Broadway’s history”. Hansberry became the first black women to receive Drama Critics Circle Award in 1959 and had earned her place in the world as an incredible playwright. Unfortunately, Hansberry grew extremely ill while preparing her next play for its Broadway premiere. She died of cancer shortly after in January

Her most famous work was A Raisin in the Sun which was “set against a backdrop of overt racism and pervasive housing discrimination in the 1950s (#8 59). In this work, a black family has just lost their patriarch, Big Walter Younger, and is trying to decide what to do with the ten-thousand dollar life insurance policy that they have been awarded. The story line focuses on each member of the family’s different opinion of what should be done with the money. While Lena Younger, the late Big Walter’s wife, would like to invest the money in buying a home in a better neighborhood so that her family can enjoy the kind of home that they deserve, Walter Lee, her son, believes that he should be allowed to use the money as an investment in a liquor store so that he can support the family and have some of the nicer things that life offers. His wife, Ruth, says that she would rather have more space for her their son, Travis, and her unborn child than anything else. Walter Lee’s sister, Beneatha, was in school at the time and thought that the money should be put toward her education so that she could become a doctor and make enough money to support the family (#7 140). Lena decides to buy a house and the Younger family must reach down inside of themselves for the courage to stand against diversity in the “white” neighborhood (#8 61). Lorraine Hansberry directly related her own experience of moving into a predominantly white neighborhood to