List Three Civil Rights Events That Lorraine (or the Hansberry Family) Was Involved With:

Lorraine Hansberry

(1930 - 1965)

"The Blackness Revolution and the White Backlash"
Forum at Boondocks Hall sponsored by The Clan of Artists for Freedom

New York Metropolis - June xv, 1964

Lorraine Hansberry

In 1959, playwright Lorraine Hansberry made history every bit the get-go black woman to take a show produced on Broadway. The play was A Raisin in the Sun, a story most a black working-class family in Chicago trying to escape the ghetto. At the time, nearly people idea a play most African Americans would be a box office bomb. Instead, Raisin was a hit. It ran on Broadway for 19 months, was made into a motion picture starring Sidney Poitier in 1961, and is now considered a classic of the American theater.

For writer James Baldwin, the near striking matter well-nigh the play was what it did for African Americans. "I had never in my life seen then many black people in the theater," he wrote. "And the reason was that never earlier, in the unabridged history of the American theater, had then much of the truth of blackness people'due south lives been seen on the stage. Black people had ignored the theater considering the theater had always ignored them."ⁱ Hansberry'south success helped open up doors for scores of black writers and artists who followed, both in theater and the wider cultural mainstream.

Lorraine Hansberry was born in 1930. She grew up on the southward side of Chicago, a identify rigidly segregated past race. In 1937, Hansberry's parents challenged Chicago'southward restrictive housing covenants by moving into an all-white neighborhood. Whites fought back. A mob gathered around the firm and someone threw a brick, barely missing immature Lorraine'south caput. Years subsequently, in a letter to The New York Times, Hansberry recalled her mother "patrolling the house all dark with a loaded German luger," while her begetter was abroad fighting the battle in court.ⁱⁱ

Working closely with the NAACP, Hansberry's father took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Courtroom and eventually won. The ruling in Hansberry v. Lee helped to outlaw housing discrimination beyond the state. Even so, the legal victory proved no friction match for Chicago'due south entrenched racism; blacks and whites remained apart.

Hansberry's parents, Carl and Nannie, were prominent members of their community and oft hosted African American luminaries who came through town. The couple were die-difficult Republicans, but it was two of their left-wing guests - Westward. Eastward. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson – who came to have a deep influence on their daughter's political views.³

When Hansberry moved to New York City in 1950, Robeson gave Hansberry her offset "real" job as a author for his new paper, Freedom. The publication had a strong socialist bent and Hansberry declared optimistically to a friend that it would become "the journal of Negro liberation."⁴ Du Bois also wrote articles for the paper and taught Hansberry African history at the Jefferson Schoolhouse of Social Science, a Marxist schoolhouse shut downward by the U.S. government at the height of the McCarthy era.⁵ Du Bois and Robeson were indomitable by anti-communist forces, but Hansberry – however relatively unknown - escaped the aforementioned persecution.

Hansberry'southward 1959 success with Raisin gave her a prominent vox in the struggle for black liberation. She delivered this spoken language at the Town Hall forum in 1964. The retentiveness of her father's failure to milkshake segregation through legal means shaped her plea for action. Having tried "respectable" ways to boxing injustice, she said, it was time to get radical.

The forum was sponsored by the Association of Artists for Freedom, a loose coalition of well-known black performers and writers that included Sidney Poitier, James Baldwin, and extra Ruddy Dee. I of the founders, Ossie Davis, told The New York Times, "We meet from fourth dimension to talk and argue…about what nosotros every bit artists can do, how we can express the anguish for the moral situation we find in this country, but non as civil rights pleaders."⁶

The Town Hall forum was designed for white liberals and black activists to accept an open conversation about tensions mounting betwixt them in the civil rights motion. Charles Silberman, one of the white panelists, described the strain in a book he published in early 1964: "[W]hen the struggle for Negro rights moves into the streets, the majority of [white] liberals are reluctant to move along with it. They are all for the Negroes' objectives, they say, merely they cannot continue with the means."⁷ During the forum Hansberry blasted this reluctance, declaring, "We have to find some manner with these dialogues to evidence and to encourage the white liberal to stop existence a liberal and become an American radical."

Writing in her periodical 2 days afterwards, Hansberry described the consequence equally explosive: "Negroes are so aroused and white people are so dislocated and sensitive to criticism."⁸ The blackness panelists included writers Paule Marshall, John O. Killens and Leroi Jones, forth with actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. James Wechsler, a columnist for the New York Post, was some other of the white panelists. He wrote that the Clan of Artists for Freedom was "ambushing captive white liberals."⁹ Meanwhile, Nat Hentoff argued in the Hamlet Vocalization that the white panel members were "estranged from Negro reality." He said Wechsler "simply did not have the capacity to really heed to what was beingness said."^ten

During the Town Hall forum, Lorraine Hansberry was battling more than ideas -she was fighting cancer. Her body was starting time to whither and she was on painkillers. Robert Nemiroff, her onetime husband, says she "rose from a sickbed," determined to participate in the forum and "set along the need for a new militancy and a radically new relationship betwixt Blacks and Whites in the liberty struggle."^xi

Privately though, Hansberry worried she was becoming a coward. "Do I remain a revolutionary?" she wrote in her periodical. "Intellectually – without a doubt. Only am I prepared to give my torso to the struggle or even my comforts?...Condolement has come to be its own corruption."¹² In July of 1964, Hansberry wrote that when she regained her health she might travel to the South "to find out what kind of revolutionary I am."¹³

Hansberry never got the chance. She died on January 12, 1965, at the age of 34.

How practice you talk about 300 years in 4 minutes? [sighs, laughter, applause] Was information technology e'er so apparent we need this dialogue? [laughter, applause]

I wrote a letter to the New York Times recently which didn't get printed, which is getting to be my rapport with the New York Times. They said that it was too personal. What information technology concerned itself with was, I was in a bit of a stew over the stall-in, because when the stall-in was first appear, I said, "Oh, My God, now everybody's gone crazy, you know, tying upwards traffic. What'due south the matter with them? You know. Who needs information technology?" And and then I noticed the reaction, starting in Washington and coming on up to New York amidst what we are all here calling the white liberal circles which was something like, you know, "Y'all Negroes deed right or y'all're going to ruin everything nosotros're trying to do." [laughter] And that got me to thinking more seriously about the strategy and the tactic that the stall-in intended to achieve.

And so I sat downward and wrote a letter to the New York Times about the fact that I am of a generation of Negroes that comes later a whole lot of other generations and my father, for instance, who was, you know, real "American" type American: successful man of affairs, very civic-minded and then forth; was the sort of American who put a bully deal of money, a smashing deal of his really extraordinary talents and a dandy bargain of passion into everything that we say is the American mode of going later goals. That is to say that he moved his family into a restricted area where no Negroes were supposed to live and then proceeded to fight the case in the courts all the way to the Supreme Courtroom of the United States. And this cost a great bargain of coin. It involved the assistance of NAACP attorneys and so on and this is the way of struggling that everyone says is the proper manner to practice and it eventually resulted in a decision against restrictive covenants which is very famous, Hansberry v. Lee. And that was very much applauded.

But the problem is that Negroes are merely every bit segregated in the city of Chicago now equally they were then [laughter] and my father died a disillusioned exile in another state. That is the reality that I'thousand faced with when I get up and I read that some Negroes my own historic period and younger say that we must now lie downward in the streets, necktie up traffic, finish ambulances, do whatsoever we can, have to the hills if necessary with some guns and fight back, you run across. This is the departure.

And I wrote to the Times and said, you know, "Can't you empathise that this is the perspective from which we are now speaking? It isn't as if we got up today and said, you know, 'what tin can we do to irritate America?' " [laughter] you lot know. It's considering that since 1619, Negroes accept tried every method of communication, of transformation of their state of affairs from petition to the vote, everything. Nosotros've tried it all. In that location isn't anything that hasn't been wearied. Isn't it rather remarkable that nosotros can talk about a people who were publishing newspapers while they were still in slavery in 1827, you see? We've been doing everything, writing editorials, Mr. Wechsler, for a long time, y'all know. [adulation]

And at present the charge of impatience is simply unbearable. I would similar to submit that the problem is that, yes, there is a trouble almost white liberals. I think there's something horrible that Norman Podhoretz, for instance, can sit downward and write the kind of trash that he did at this 60 minutes. [adulation] That is to say that a distinguished American thinker can literally say that he is more disturbed at the sight of a mixed couple or that anti-Semitism from Negroes – and anti-Semitism from anybody is horrible and icky and I don't intendance where it comes from – but anti-Semitism, somehow, from a Negro apparently upsets him more than than it would from a German fascist, you lot meet. This was the implication of what really gets to him. [applause] Well, you have to understand that when we are confronted with that, nosotros wonder who we are talking to and how far we are going to go.

The problem is nosotros have to observe some way with these dialogues to bear witness and to encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical. [applause] I think that then it wouldn't – when that becomes true, some of the actually eloquent things that were said earlier about the basic fabric of our society, which subsequently all, is the thing which must be changed, you know, [adulation] to really solve the problem, you know. The bones organization of American lodge is the thing that has Negroes in the situation that they are in and never allow us lose sight of it.

When nosotros then talk with that understanding, it won't be so hard for people like Mr. Wechsler, whose sincerity I wouldn't dream of challenging, when I say to him [laughter] – his sincerity is one matter, I don't have to agree with his position. Just information technology wouldn't exist so difficult for me to say, well, now, when someone uses the term "cold war liberal" that it is entirely different, you run across, the style that yous would assess the Vietnamese war and the way that I would considering I can't believe … [applause] I can't believe that anyone who is given what an American Negro is given – y'all know, our viewpoint – can believe that a government which has at its disposal a Federal Bureau of Investigation which cannot always find the murderers of Negroes and past that method… [adulation] and shows that it cares really very niggling almost American citizens who are black, really are over somewhere fighting a war for a bunch of other colored people, you know, [laughter] several 1000 miles – you just take a different viewpoint.

This is why nosotros want the dialogue, to explain that to yous, you lot see. Information technology isn't a question of patriotism and loyalty. My brother fought for this country, my grandfather before that and so on and that's all a lot of nonsense when nosotros criticize. The betoken is that we take a unlike viewpoint because, you know, nosotros've been kicked in the face and so oft and the vantage point of Negroes is entirely different and these are some of the things nosotros're trying to say. I don't want to become past my fourth dimension. Thank yous. [adulation]

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Source: http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/blackspeech/lhansberry.html

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