Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Hansberry (19 May 1930 – 12 January 1965) was an American playwright.

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A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men — and people in general.
- As quoted in Wild Women Talk Back : Audacious Advice for the Bedroom, Boardroom, and Beyond (2004) by Autumn Stephens, p. 15

I look at you and I see the final triumph of stupidity in the world!
- Beneatha to Walter, Act III

Children see things very well sometimes — and idealists even better.
- Asagai to Beneatha, Act III

Don't get up. Just sit a while and think. Never be afraid to sit a while and think.
- Asagai to Beneatha, Act III

There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing. Have you cried for that boy today? I don't mean for yourself and for the family 'cause we lost the money. I mean for him; what he's been through and what it done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most; when they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain't through learning — because that ain't the time at all. It's when he's at his lowest and can't believe in hisself 'cause the world done whipped him so. When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is.
- Mama, Act III

To Be Young, Gifted and Black : Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words (1969)

I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough and — I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations.
- p. 100

Eventually it comes to you: the thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.
- p. 137

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It is hard for me to talk about Lorraine in a way because I loved her. She was like my baby sister, in a way. I can't think of her without a certain amount of pain. Every artist, every writer goes under the hammer. But under ordinary circumstances, since a writer's real ambition is to be anonymous and since his work is done in private, one arrives at some way of living with the hammer. But the black writer is by definition public, and he lives under something much worse. The pressure of being a writer is one thing, but the pressure of being a public figure is another and they are antithetical, too. The strain can kill you. It is certainly one of the things that killed Lorraine, who was very vivid, very young, very curious, very courageous, very honest. But she died, as you know, subsequent to the eruption in Birmingham, as the country, in fact, began to go over the cliff. Many of us began to realize then that there was no way of redeeming the American Republic. It was bent on destruction. This was one of the things that killed her. It was the incomprehension of her country and the disaster overtaking the nation, which, after all, she, like I, had many reasons to love. We were born there, and our ancestors paid a great deal for it.
- interview in Conversations with James Baldwin edited by Louis H. Pratt and Fred L. Standley (1989)

The great victims in this country of the institution called segregation, which is not solely a southern custom but has been for a hundred years a national way of life-the great victims are the white people, and the white man's children. Lorraine Hansberry said this afternoon when we were talking about the problem of being a Negro male in this society. Lorraine said that she wasn't too concerned really about Negro manhood since they had managed to endure and to even transcend fantastic things, but she was very worried about a civilization which could produce those 5 policemen standing on the Negro woman's neck in Birmingham or wherever it was, and I am too.
- 1963 interview in Conversations with James Baldwin edited by Louis H. Pratt and Fred L. Standley (1989)

Years later when Alpheus Hunton, Lou Burnham and Lorraine Hansberry started Freedom, the newspaper in which Paul Robeson wrote, they portrayed Africa-a big black giant, in shackles, ready to break loose. I realized then that there was a large segment of Black America caught up in the African movement, in African history.
- Rosa Guy 1988 interview in Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989)

My first real job was as an art editor of the People's Voice...The secretary who was there gently growing her wings was Lorraine Hansberry.
- Ollie Harrington, Why I Left America and Other Stories (1994)

The position of women has been debated in socialist and communist circles, but even there it is usually left as a question. And black women specifically? They have never been a primary subject of the American Left, always falling somewhere in the cracks between the Negro Question and the Woman Question. As we've seen, key interventions by the likes of Ida B. Wells or Claudia Jones attempted to disrupt color- and class-struggle-as-usual, but few leftists paid attention. Nearly half a century ago, black playwright and critic Lorraine Hansberry took the Communists to task for failing to recognize that the Woman Question stood alongside class, race, colonialism, and the struggle for peace as "the greatest social question existent."
- Robin Kelley Freedom Dreams (2002)

"We the people-still an excellent phrase," said the playwright Lorraine Hansberry in 1962, well aware who had been excluded, yet believing the phrase might someday come to embrace us all…Lorraine Hansberry spoke her words about government during the Cuban missile crisis, at a public meeting in New York to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee. She also said in that speech, "My government is wrong." She did not say, I abhor all government. She claimed her government as a citizen, African American, and female, and she challenged it.
- Adrienne Rich Arts of the Possible (2001)

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