Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Hansberry grew up in Chicago in a family that fought a restrictive covenant to the Supreme Court, worked on Paul Robeson’s newspaper in Harlem, and at twenty-nine became the first Black woman to have a play on Broadway. A Raisin in the Sun, its title from Langston Hughes, follows the Younger family’s decision to move into a white neighbourhood with the insurance money from the father’s death, and ran for over a year in 1959. She died of cancer at thirty-four with a second play on Broadway. Nina Simone’s song took its title from her unfinished autobiography.