Radical Vision

I’ve taught Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun many times in my university courses. That play transformed African American theater in the Civil Rights era and marked a phenomenal debut for its 29-year-old writer. In her too-short life (she died a few years later from pancreatic cancer), Hansberry built an extraordinary life as a writer, intellectual, and political activist. This biography tells that rich, remarkable story.

Lorraine Hansberry’s life and intellectual thought has been distorted, Colbert argues, by being filtered almost entirely through her Broadway hit play, A Raisin in the Sun (1959). The media mischaracterized Hansberry as a liberal, middle-class suburban housewife, ignoring her intersectional radical activism as well as her sexual identity as a lesbian. Providing a new intellectual radical genealogy for Hansberry, Colbert highlights her time in 1950s New York, when she was hired by Paul Robeson to write for Freedom, a monthly journal for Black leftists. Then, in the early 1960s, the last years of her short life, Hansberry collaborated with… show more.