Mollie Godfrey - Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry

Literary Conversations Series

Monika Gehlawat

General Editor

Edited by Mollie Godfrey

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

Publication of this work was made possible in part by a generous grant from James Madison University.

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Copyright 2021 by University Press of Mississippi

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Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2021

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

LCCN 2020044651

ISBN 9781496829634 (hardback)

ISBN 9781496829641 (trade paperback)

ISBN 9781496829658 (epub single)

ISBN 9781496829665 (epub institutional)

ISBN 9781496829672 (pdf single)

ISBN 9781496829689 (pdf institutional)

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Plays and Screenplays

A Raisin in the Sun: A Drama in Three Acts. Acting edition. New York: Random House, 1959.

The Sign in Sidney Brusteins Window. New York: Random House, 1965.

To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. Adapted by Robert Nemiroff. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969.

The Drinking Gourd in the Voices of Man Literature Series. Ed. by Vincent L. Medeiros and Diana B. Boettcher. MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1969.

Les Blancs in Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry. Ed. Robert Nemiroff. New York: Random House, 1972.

What Use Are Flowers? in Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry. Ed. Robert Nemiroff. New York: Random House, 1972.

Raisin. Musical adaptation by Robert Nemiroff and Charlotte Zaltsberg. New York: Samuel French, 1978.

Toussaint: Excerpt from Act I of a Work in Progress (1961) in Nine Plays by Black Women. Ed. Margaret Buford Wilkerson. New York: New American Library, 1986.

A Raisin in the Sun: The Unfilmed Original Screenplay. Ed. Robert Nemiroff. New York: Plume Book, 1992.

Nonfiction

The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964.

Films and Audio Recordings

A Raisin in the Sun. Directed by Daniel Petrie. Columbia Pictures, 1961.

Lorraine Hansberry: A Raisin in the Sun. Full cast recording with Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Steve Mitchell, Diana Sands, Claudia McNeil, Zakes Mokae, Harold Scott, Sam Schacht, and Leonard Jackson. New York: Caedmon Records, 1969.

To Be Young, Gifted and Black. Directed by Michael Shultz. PBS, 1972.

Lorraine Hansberry: To Be Young, Gifted and Black. Full cast recording with James Earl Jones, Camille Yarborough, John Towey, Barbara Baxley, Garn Stephens, Claudia McNeil, and Tina Sattin. New York: Caedmon Records, 1972.

Lorraine Hansberry Speaks Out: Art and the Black Revolution. A collection of seven interviews and speeches recorded between 1959 and 1964. New York: Caedmon Records, 1972.

A Raisin in the Sun. Directed by Bill Duke. American Playhouse (PBS), 1989.

A Raisin in the Sun. Directed by Kenny Leon. Sony Pictures, 2008.

Collected Works

A Raisin in the Sun and The Sign in Sidney Brusteins Window. Ed Robert Nemiroff. New York: New American Library, 1966.

Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays. Includes Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers? Ed. Robert Nemiroff. New York: Random House, 1972.

The Lorraine Hansberry Audio Collection. Includes the 1969 recording of A Raisin in the Sun, the 1972 recording of To Be Young, Gifted and Black, and the 1972 collection, Lorraine Hansberry Speaks Out. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.

Lorraine Hansberry / 1958

Faye Hammel / 1959

Sidney Fields / 1959

Ted Poston / 1959

Jack Gaver / 1959

Lillian Ross / 1959

David Susskind / 1959

Rev. William Hamilton / 1959

Mike Wallace / 1959

Studs Terkel / 1959

Lorraine Hansberry / 1959

Harold R. Isaacs / 1960

Nat Hentoff / 1961

Mitch Miller / 1961

Patricia Marx / 1961

Lorraine Hansberry / 1961

Frank Perry / 1961

Eleanor Fischer / 1961

Diane Fisher / 1963

Association of Artists for Freedom / 1964

Lerone Bennett Jr. and Margaret G. Burroughs / 1979

It is hard to think of another writer whose career was as brief as Lorraine Hansberrys, yet whose artistic and political impact was as transformative. Spanning from the debut of A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway in 1959 to her early death from cancer in January of 1965, Hansberrys short stint in the public eye changed the landscape of American theater. With A Raisin in the Sun, she became both the first African American woman to have a play produced on Broadway and the first to win the prestigious New York Drama Critics Circle Award. In 1961, the film version of Raisin starring Sidney Poitier won the Gary Cooper Award for Human Values at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for best screenplay of the year by the Writers Guild of America. Raisins plot resonated deeply with the aims of the civil rights movementin the play, a working-class Black family struggles to decide how to spend the insurance money left by their fathers death. The family finally bands together and decides to move into an all-white neighborhood over the neighborhood associations efforts to bribe them into staying away. Quickly becoming one of the defining works of art of the period, Raisin also ushered in a new era of Black representation on the stage and screen, displacing the cartoonish stereotypes that were the remnants of blackface minstrelsy in favor of complex three-dimensional portrayals of Black characters and Black life. Hansberrys public discourse in the aftermath of Raisins success also disrupted mainstream critical tendencies to diminish the work of Black artists, which helped to pave the way for future work by Black playwrights such as Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, Lynn Nottage, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

Within a few years of her plays Broadway debut, Hansberry had become not only one of the best-known Black writers in the United States, but also one of the nations most outspoken public intellectuals. Before Raisin premiered, Hansberry had been working for several years as a writer and editor for Paul Robesons left-wing anticolonial Black newspaper, Freedom. In 1952, she traveled to Uruguay to speak at the Intercontinental Peace Conference on Robesons behalf and was put under surveillance by the FBI upon her return. After Raisin, Hansberry suddenly had a much wider audience. Her letters to the editor, essays, and interviews were published in a wide range of publications; she appeared as a guest on popular radio and television programs; and she gave speeches at venues such as the American Academy of Psychotherapists and the United Negro College Fund. Even as illness began to overtake her, she threw her full weight behind the civil rights movement, taking part in the historic 1963 meeting between civil rights activists and Bobby Kennedy and writing the text for