• PLAYWRIGHT
• Author of A Raisin in the Sun, the FIRST play performed on Broadway that was written by a Black woman, and the FIRST with a Black director
• The daughter of two civil rights activists, she grew up in a mostly white housing development, where one of the neighbors threw a concrete block through their living room window; other neighbors sued the Hansberrys, trying to force them to move
• Moved to New York City and worked as an associate editor of an activist paper that fought racism
• A Raisin in the Sun, named after a line in a Langston Hughes poem, is about a Black family surviving in segregated America
• The show ran for two years, with more than 500 performances, and has been revived numerous times since
• Hansberry was the FIRST Black woman and YOUNGEST playwright to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award (for her A Raisin in the Sun script)
• Although she never publicly stated her sexual orientation, articles she wrote about homophobia in The Ladder magazine under the initials L.H. have led scholars to believe she was lesbian

Bibliography: Imani, Blair. Modern Herstory: Stories of Women and Nonbinary People Rewriting History. New York: Ten Speed Press, 2018. Print.
Marciniak, Kristin. Women in Arts and Entertainment. Minneapolis: Abdo Publishing, 2017. Print.
Biography.com Editors. (2018, January 19). Lorraine Hansberry. https://www.biography.com/writer/lorraine-hansberry

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