by Imani Perry
As Lorraine turned ten, life behind the veil took on a stunning public face when the American Negro Exposition opened. The exposition was held July 4–September 2, 1940. Truman Gibson Sr., one of Carl’s business partners, served as its executive director. It celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the conclusion of the Civil War and was billed as a sort of Negro World’s Fair. Funded by a $75,000 matching grant from the WPA, it was an enormous collaborative effort. The exposition was held at the Eighteenth Street armory on the near South Side. Visitors to the exhibition entered a virtual city of Black American accomplishment. The center hall was dominated by a replica of Lincoln’s tomb. The exposition included a temple of religion with material from ten denominations, and films were screened in North Hall. There was a live theater, displays for the Associated Negro Press, a federal government display, dioramas with images of historic Black figures, a social science booth featuring the renowned Black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, and the Tanner Gallery, which was a juried art show featuring the largest display of African American art that had ever been presented.
A small child in a vast city of the race, Lorraine witnessed her world. She also saw the thousands of Black visitors who were eager to see themselves reflected. WPA and communist artists and intellectuals in whose tradition she would follow were part of the exhibition. They included Margaret Taylor Goss, Charles White, Horace Cayton, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Melvin Tolson, whose poem “Dark Symphony” was chosen to represent the exhibition. Tolson’s high modernist, seven-part evocation of Black history and creative resilience concludes with an elegant and enthusiastic embrace of Americanism, civil rights, and socialism:
Out of the dead-ends of Poverty,
Through wildernesses of Superstition,
Across barricades of Jim Crowism . . .
We advance!
We the Peoples of the World . . .
We advance!13
Walking through the exhibition, perhaps Lorraine felt the Rooseveltian atmosphere she described as suffusing the homes of her classmates and the cosmopolitan milieu of her own home. She already knew many of the figures celebrated as heroes of Black America. Her uncle Leo brought fellow intellectuals to her house. Her parents were friends and associates of many activists and leaders. She witnessed the interior workings of Black aspiration for the masses and for the leadership class, and in the exhibition she saw the ways those aspirations could be made to explode into the world. She must have imagined her own future in that throng.
Though she described herself as bookish and somewhat retreating, consistent with her family tradition, Lorraine was a leader as a child. She became president of both the Ivyettes and the Gadabouts clubs, social organizations that bourgeois Black people created for their children. However, as she recalled, these children of the elite were not the ones whom she sought out for friendship. Instead she was drawn to the throngs. Lorraine sustained the greatest admiration for the children of the working class. She found them appealing because, as she described it, “they fought back.” She was taken by their demands for respect and willingness to make those demands physical: “The girls as well as the boys. They fought. If you were not right with them there they were after school, waiting for you, a little gang of them in their gym shoes, blocking off the sidewalk. Face to face with the toughest the dialogue began.”14
Lorraine, though flourishing according to the rules of the bourgeois, stepped away from its standards of evaluation and mandates of respectability. She liked the rough and tumble self-regard of children who weren’t afraid of conflict or assertion.
There is a certain poetry that in the year Lorraine turned ten, the year of the exhibition, and the year when the Hansberry v. Lee case was decided, Richard Wright’s Native Son was published. It was a Chicago novel, identified as a protest novel by some, and an immediate best seller through the popular Book of the Month Club. Wright’s unflinching depiction of Chicago’s poor and Black South Side featured a deliberately unredeemable antihero in the form of Bigger Thomas. He was not, as Lorraine would describe her peers, self-possessed, clever, and proud. He was defined by his condition of oppression, so much so that any sense of self outside his circumstance couldn’t be found. Wright’s indictment of American racism in the form of a monstrous character elicited ire from many sectors of Black America. However, his literary brilliance shaped the legacy of Black Chicago and its writers, even those who were still yet to be, like Lorraine. Though it is unlikely that she read Native Son at age ten, she knew a Black Chicago writer, born in Mississippi like her father, had appeared on the national stage. It was another example of Black striving and achievement in her midst.
Lorraine graduated from Betsy Ross Elementary and matriculated at Englewood High School in 1944. During her years at Englewood, notwithstanding her love of reading and her gift for leadership, she wasn’t an outstanding student. She described herself as “not . . . particularly bright. . . . I had some popularity and a premature desire, probably irritating, to be accepted in my circle on my terms.”15 Lorraine was average at most academic things: she received a C in stage design and a C in contemporary literature. In a somewhat sweet irony, she received a D in theater. But her intellectualism was apparent despite a mediocre academic performance. On a kitschy quiz she filled out during high school years, she answered questions in ways that showed what an active mind she possessed.16 Under the heading “Favorite Book” she chose two. The first was the controversial white Southern author Lillian Smith’s novel Strange Fruit, the story of an interracial romance between an upper-class white boy named Tracy and an intelligent and beautiful Black girl named Nonnie. In it, Tracy impregnates Nonnie, and, in a bit of Shakespearean intrigue, initially plans to pay a Black man to marry her to preserve her reputation. But then at the last minute Tracy decides to admit that he loves Nonnie. Before he is able to do so, Tracy is murdered, and the proposed fiancé, Big Henry, is falsely accused of the crime and lynched. It was socially relevant and truly melodramatic. Teenaged Lorraine’s other favorite novel was River George, African American author George Lee’s 1937 semiautobiographical tale about a college-educated Tennessee sharecropper who is implicated in a murder case and has to flee to Memphis to save his own life.
Lorraine’s taste for drama extended to her favorite songs: the graduation tune “Pomp and Circumstance” and the early 1940s romantic hit “Black Magic.” The latter seemed to have a double meaning, both an adolescent yearning for romance and her own sense of mysticism associated with “Blackness” itself.
Likewise, Lorraine’s heroes were Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution, and Hannibal, the North African general. Again, inklings of her deep sense of purpose matched with a romantic sensibility are evident, as are glimmers of her nascent far leftist politics and her attraction to “working people” and the peasantry. She listed her favorite author as the Nobel Prize–winning Pearl Buck, who narrated the lives of Chinese peasants, and among her favorite songs an Irish folk tune called “The Kerry Dance.” Lorraine’s early political inclinations, ones that departed from her parents’, were shaped by the range of people she encountered. In addition to several well-known Black socialists who visited her home, Lorraine was mentored by a downstairs neighbor, Ray Hansborough, a Black man with a strident pen and passionate political commitments, who was a member of the Communist Party and who served as the secretary of the National Negro Commission. More broadly, Lorraine came of age in the throes of the most urgent Black political debates of the day—integrationism versus internationalism, capitalism versus socialism, upward mobility or grassroots organizing—and she reveled in the ideas. The debates were at school and also at home. Future civil rights organizer James Forman, who was a year ahead of Lorraine at Englewood High School, in his 1972 memoir, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, recalled their time together. He wrote, “I felt stimulated all the time, excited about what I read and the talks I had with fellow students. A key factor was the intense internationalism of this
wartime and post war period. Half the world had united to fight fascism; the United States and the Soviet Union were allies. Our studies at school took place unfettered by the Communist bugaboo that swept in later. No topic was taboo in class.”17
Black soldiers who were returning from World War II were emboldened in their fight against racism. The students were aware and invested in national and international debates. Lorraine and Forman (whose nickname was Rufus) were often sucked into them, sometimes on the same side and sometimes opposed. Although she was distinctly passionate about the world, she came of age in a time and place that facilitated this passion. Her growing political sophistication allowed her to understand what it meant to live in a ghetto and how ghettoization connected her to people across the globe—whether in Warsaw or India.
Unexpectedly, two months before Lorraine’s sixteenth birthday, tragedy struck. Her father, Carl Hansberry, died. The loss would haunt her for the remainder of her life. He collapsed far away, in Mexico, stricken by a brain aneurysm. Carl had bitterly decided there was little hope for a racially integrated and just life in the United States, and he planned to move his family south of the border, a decision that a small but determined collection of African Americans, including Langston Hughes’s father, had made in the past. Despite all his patriotism, Carl had given up the fight for racial equality in America. And he lost, far away from his family. The telegram Mrs. Hansberry sent to her children from Mexico read, “Daddy passed will be home as soon as possible with body be brave. Mother.”18
I have no detailed record of his funeral services or the contours of Lorraine’s grief. But the return to her father—honoring him, arguing with him, thinking about the aftermath of his death—is all over her work as a writer. She remained unreconciled to his death, and most of us who have lost those we love dearly can feel this in our own chests and throats. Thereafter, Lorraine also expunged all conventional American patriotism from her heart. That mythology couldn’t sustain even one of its most loyal Black believers, her dead father. And certainly not his youngest child.
But she went on.
The remainder of Lorraine’s high school days were far from mundane. Maybe they distracted her from grief. At least one event in school further shaped her attitude toward America and its failures. Englewood High School was integrated. The mixed student body seemed fairly amiable until the administration was forced to increase its proportion of Black students. The composition of the neighborhood had changed and overcrowding plagued the city’s all Black schools. Soon, more Black youth flooded Englewood’s halls. This angered Lorraine’s white schoolmates. In response, in the spring of 1947, white students staged a strike. The drama that Lorraine remembered (and put into a short story) centered less on the white students and their slurs and jeers than on Black students and their response, and specifically the different types of Black students’ responses. At her school, with its more carefully assimilated population, “well-dressed colored students, like myself, had stood amusedly around, simply staring at the mob of taunting whites, and showing not the least inclination to assert racial pride.” But then another group of Black students, who heard about the white student strike, arrived. These were kids from Wendell Phillips High School. She referred to them as “The Veterans”: “Carloads of them, waving baseball bats. The word had gone—into the ghetto. [. . .] And so they had come, pouring out of the bowels of the ghetto: the children of the Unqualified Oppressed; the children of the Black working class in their costumes of pegged pants and conked heads and tight anklets held up by rubber bands.”19
They fought back. And the resistance of the working class and poor Black youth had results. The mayor met with school board members and the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, and soon thereafter a public statement was released by the Chicago school board reiterating that segregation was illegal. Police dispersed the striking students, arrested some, and made them and their parents listen to a lecture about the wrongs of their actions, which would, if persisted, result in disciplinary action against them as truants. The postwar shift toward liberal integrationism undoubtedly played a role in the willingness of the city to act finally on behalf of Black young people. But in Lorraine’s fictionalized version of events, the boldness of the Wendell Phillips students was the most important force. Her literary indictment of bourgeois passivity (and of her own social class) comes in a moment in Young, Gifted and Black when she ventriloquized a simple shout of the Wendell Phillips students: “WE BETTER GO CAUSE THEM LITTLE CHICKENSHIT NIGGERS OUT THERE AINT ABOUT TO FIGHT.”20
Lorraine would fictionalize this event in another unpublished short story called “The Riot.” What is interesting in that version is that it pivots around a standoff between a Black student and a white police officer eager to brutalize the youth. In “The Riot” she changed the direction of the insult “chickenshit.” A Black boy uses the term to describe the white student protestors, rather than directing it toward the assimilated Black students. In this version, Lorraine created a collective Black consciousness; together the kids resisted white attacks and police violence. She chose to create something different from what she often saw: a weak and compliant Black middle class whose elitism created a persistent tension with the rest of the Black community, notwithstanding that all of Black Chicago lived behind the veil together.
Lorraine was ashamed of the snobbery and fearfulness of Black elites. She embraced a “we” that was larger and bolder than her bourgeois origins. But most of all in the story, one feels her sense of frustration that the tension of the moment, the possibility that it might lead to a larger movement, was lost. There’s a climax, a lot of talk, and finally the distraction of Christmas shopping undermines it all. She wanted to keep the fight alive.
Perhaps the loss of her father, and the losses of his brand of fighting for racial justice, made the fight of the teenagers from Wendell Phillips all the more invigorating. A different kind of fight might yield different kinds of results. But perhaps too Lorraine saw fighting of whichever sort to be part of her calling, following in her father’s footsteps, because she became the person in the family who would carry forward his tradition of activism, despite her departure from his methods.
In Lorraine’s senior year, she served as the president of the Forum, a debate organization of both Black and white students. Among their topics that year were the current politics and histories of Russia and Palestine, and they hosted a major debate against Austin High School with the topic “Should the federal government require arbitration of all labor disputes in basic American industries?” She was engaged with global political concerns and the particular trouble of racial injustice in the United States. She decided she wanted to become a journalist when she grew up (earlier she had expressed an interest in law). Though teenagers are fickle aspirants, Lorraine’s political sophistication and passion for reading, writing, and justice made journalism an appropriate and likely career aspiration.
But she was still a kid when she graduated from Englewood High School in 1948. The comments of her peers on the pages of her yearbook suggest both her youthfulness and her inscrutability. They call her “swell” and “nice” though disorganized. One wrote, “In 1960s when we’ll both be matrons I’ll remember your off key singing, your junky locker, financial problems in general, maladjustments galore and most of all for your never seeming to get anywhere on time.” The teasing is playful, but also suggests a lingering sense of misfittedness. One inscription, however, reads differently.
Dear Lorraine,
These years I’ve known you have been the most wonderful in all my life. You don’t know how I lived for each day when I could come to school each morning and behold your wonderful face. And now that we are parting I don’t know how I will go on. Please hurry back to me Dear one. I would like to murder you.
Yours always,21
The signature is scratched out. It appears to read “Anita,” and something else is written on top, in its stead. It might be “Lynn.” It might be
“Lipid.” This palimpsest, seventy years later, as I attempt to piece together Lorraine’s story is at first tempting. I want to unearth the first layer by deduction. Which girls’ names began and ended in A? I ask myself, going through page by page. But then I decide to leave the mystery intact. The task of the biographer is always incomplete. No matter how meticulous she takes herself to be, the biographer mustn’t venture from archaeology to intrusion or wild speculation, despite the intriguing possibilities of the latter two. The word scratched out could mean a number of things: secrecy, an inside joke, a romantic reference, a lifelong attachment. I don’t know. What is clear is that for some young woman at Englewood High School, Lorraine was a source of joy. And, in adolescent melodramatic form, the end of their daily life together felt disastrous. This detail added a softness to my digging, which so often for the early years of Lorraine’s life seemed to yield a sense of melancholy, loneliness, and intellectual yearning, but never intimacy.
Maybe that’s why she stepped off the beaten track so many times, starting in 1948. Had Lorraine been a conventional young, Black, middle-class woman, she would have gone to study at a historically Black college or university; probably the academically distinguished Fisk or to Howard University where her uncle Leo taught. But Lorraine chose to step into uncharted territory: the large, progressive, and populist University of Wisconsin at Madison, where only a smattering of Black students had enrolled since 1875. Her first major life decision, though a temporary one, would set her on an unexpected and extraordinary course.
