Lorraine Hansberry – Monday 19 May 1930 – Tuesday 12 January 1965

Introduction

Though I often have to confess that “Yes, I’ve seen the movie and no, I haven’t read the book”. In the case of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin In The Sun, I can say that “Yes, I’ve seen the movie and yes, I’ve read the play”. Although the play is her best-known work, it is Lorraine’s autobiography, To Be Young, Gifted And Black, that is the focus here. I will never write a comprehensive autobiography (although perhaps a selective memoir or two), so I do respect anyone who willingly presents their whole life to the world.

Excerpt from Chicago: Southside Summers in To Be Young, Gifted And Black

“For some time now-I think since I was a child-I have been possessed of the desire to put down the stuff of my life. That is a commonplace impulse, apparently, among persons of massive self-interest; sooner or later we all do it. And, I am quite certain, there is only one internal quarrel: how much of the truth to tell? How much, how much; how much! It is brutal, in sober uncompromising moments, to reflect on the comedy of concern we all enact when it comes to our precious images!

Even so, when such vanity as propels the writing of such memoirs is examined, certainly one would wish at least to have some boast of social serviceability on one’s side. I shall set down on these pages what shall seem to me to the truth of my life and essences…which are to be found, first of all, in the Southside of Chicago, where I was born….

All travelers to my city should ride the elevated trains that race along the back ways of Chicago. The lives you can look into!

I think you could find the tempo of my people on their back porches. The honesty of their living is there in the shabbiness. Scrubbed porches that sag and look their danger. Dirty gray wood steps. And always a line of white and pink clothes scrubbed so well, waving in the dirty wind of the city.

My people are poor. And they are tired. And they are determined to live.

Our Southside is a place apart: each piece of our living is a protest.”


Yesterday’s writer – Edith Hamilton
Tomorrow’s writer – Lillian Hellman

Source: Hansberry, Lorraine. To Be Young, Gifted And Black. Signet, 1970. ISBN 0-451-11080-3. Excerpt: page 45

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of To Be Young, Gifted And Black

Center: Lorraine Hansberry from the website en.wikipedia.org