Lorraine Hansberry, The First Major Black Theatrical Voice To Emerge From America |
Posted: March 31, 2020 |
The roots of her artistic vision and activism are here in Chicago. Born into a family of substantial means and parents who were intellectuals and activists, her father, Carl Augustus Hansberry, Sr. from Gloucester, Mississippi, moved to Chicago after attending Alcorn College, and became known as the "kitchenette king" after subdividing large homes vacated by whites moving to the suburbs and selling these small apartments or kitchenettes to African American migrants from the South. Carl was not only a successful real estate businessman,but an inventor and a politician as well being an active member of the Republican Party who ran for congress in 1940. Hansberry's mother, Nannie Perry, the college educated daughter of an African Methodist Episcopal minister,who became a schoolteacher and, later, ward committeewoman, was from Tennessee. Both parents were activists challenging discriminating Jim Crow Laws. Because of their stature in the black community such important black leaders as Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, Joe Louis and Langston Hughes frequented their home as Lorraine was growing up. Lorraine's uncle, Willliam Leo Hansberry, a Howard University professor of African history in D.C. 1959 after rejecting employment offers from Atlanta University and the Honorable Marcus Garvey was another important influence on her. As a scholar of African history who taught at Howard University, his students included some of the most decisive figures in African nationalism such as Kwame Nkrumah first president of Ghana and Nnamdi Azikwe, the first Nigerian president. So important was he to Africa especially that a college at the University of Nigeria was named in his honor. While Lorraine was growing up she was frequently exposed to the perspectives of such young African students who were regularly invited home to family dinners. Although they could afford good private schools, Lorraine was educated in the segregated public schools as her family worked within the system to change the laws governing segregation. At an early age she learned to fight white supremacy. She had grown disgusted of seeing Negroes being spat at, cursed and pummeled with insults and physical acts of violence. This data was written with Essay Writers! In protest against the segregation laws her parents sent her to public schools rather than private ones. She attended Betsy Ross Elementary School and then in 1944 Englewood High School where she encountered the children of the working class whose independence courage and struggles which would soon become the subject of her first major play she came to admire. Both schools were predominately white. Lorraine even had to fight racism from the day she walked through the doors of Betsy Ross Elementary School. Although she and her siblings enjoyed privileges unknown to their working-class schoolmates, the parents infused their children with racial pride and civic responsibility. They founded the Hansberry Foundation, an organization designed to inform African Americans of their civil rights, and encouraged their children to challenge the exclusionary policies of local restaurants and stores. When Lorraine was eight, her parents moved the whole family to occupy a house they had bought in a restricted all-white neighborhood in another effort to defy the segregation law then prevalent. Such white neighborhoods excluded African Americans through the then widely used restrictive covenants. Carl Hansberry, while resisting such attacks on his home and family from neighborhood hoodlums, took his case to court in order to remain there. As Lorraine Hansberry's parents fought against segregation, armed guards protected her and her siblings. But at one point a slab of concrete almost crushed Lorraine. In https://essayfreelancewriters.com/blog/national-honor-society-essays/ . Supreme Court ruled restrictive covenants unconstitutional in a case that came to be known as Hansberry v. Lee, although it did little to affect the actual practice of segregated housing in Chicago. This experience was what later inspired her writing of her most famous work, A Raisin in the Sun. Carl A. Hansberry later contributed large sums of money to NAACP and the urban league. Unfortunately he died in 1946 before he could complete plans to move his family to Mexico City when Lorraine's two brothers had difficulties accommodating to segregation in the U.S. Hansberry's interest in Africa began at an early age.
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