by Imani Perry
She had said part of what she had to say, but there were other words burning inside of her so I wonder, as she takes her place in the great beyond, was she supposed to say it all or just put the lights on so that someone else might now step from the wings and continue the dialogue. . . . Give her her immortality, for it was justly earned in a never ceasing no man’s land where the living is only easy in song.1
In the car, riding back to my own life, I smile. And I cry.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was made possible by a community that believed in bringing Lorraine into greater view. I am especially grateful to my amazing editor, Gayatri Patnaik; editorial assistant Molly Velasquez; and the entire Beacon Press community. Elleza Kelly was the research assistant of my dreams. Steven Fullwood and Alexsandra Mitchell provided indispensable support and guidance with the Lorraine Hansberry Collections at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The students in my Lorraine Hansberry 20th Century Master Course—Destiny Crockett, Nicky Steidel, Imani Ford, Imani Thornton, Alana Clark, Abigail Jean Baptiste, and Jennifer Bunkley—inspired me with their diligent study and active imaginations. Brilliant documentarian Tracy Strain and her crew gave me abundant information and encouragement and meaningful camaraderie. At a fortuitous meeting with the premier Hansberry scholar Margaret Wilkerson in the Bay Area, she gave me insight and encouragement, and that meant a great deal to me. The great Beverly Guy-Sheftall, a beacon and guide in Black feminist study, opened doors and shared important stories and details. My dear friend Theo Davis and the community of the Mahindra Center at Harvard were wonderful discussants as I wrote. My friend Ashon Crawley helped me distill the essence of Lorraine over hundreds of text messages and meditations on soul searching. My friends Michele Alexandre and Simone White held me down and lifted me up the many times the vagaries of life threatened to take me away from my calling. All of my friends listened and encouraged, especially Kathy Van Cleve, Farah Griffin, Regina Bradley, Tarana Burke, Darnell Moore, Shantrelle Lewis, and Robert Garland.
And as always, being a part of my wonderful community in the African American Studies Department at Princeton facilitated and nurtured this project. I am especially grateful for my writing partner and interlocutor, Eddie S. Glaude Jr.; my Northwest Philly community café buddy and fellow Black feminist socialist, Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor; and the ever-organized, supportive, and delightful Dionne Worthy.
My family is always with me as I study and write. I attempt to honor my extended family and the legacy of our matriarch, Neida Garner Perry, in every effort. Throughout the book-writing process the guidance and support of my mother, Theresa Perry, was essential. My sons, Freeman Diallo Rabb and Issa Garner Rabb, who are gorgeous beings in every way, believe in my work and the importance of effort, craft, ideas, and art. That keeps me writing. My late father, Steve Whitman, gifted me with his love for Lorraine. What a gift!
Finally, this is a labor of love offered with gratitude to the many, the people whom Lorraine loved and I love, our people. In particular, I am indebted to the long genealogy of “Black queer genius,” to riff on Steven Fullwood’s book title and subject. Against all odds, facing enormous obstacles, Black queer genius has been sustained on pages, on stages, canvases and testimonies, ballrooms and battlefields, scores and clubs, indoors and out in the streets. Queer contributions to the tradition of Black thought and art are immense and essential. It is now time to bring Black queer work and stories from the margins to the center.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION: LORRAINE’S TIME
1. Lonne Elder, “Lorraine Hansberry: Social Consciousness and the Will,” Freedomways 19 (1979): 213.
2. Michael Nash and Daniel J. Leab, “Freedomways,” in Red Activists and Black Freedom: James and Esther Jackson and the Long Civil Rights Movement, ed. David Levering Lewis, Michael Nash, and Daniel J. Leab (London: Routledge, 2013), 62.
3. “Tribute Paid the Late Lorraine Hansberry: She Gave New Life to ‘Negro’ Drama,” Pittsburgh Courier, January 23, 1965.
CHAPTER ONE: MIGRATION SONG
1. Robert Nemiroff, ed., To Be Young, Gifted and Black: A Portrait of Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words (New York: Samuel French, 1971), 12.
2. Ibid., 26.
3. Ibid., 29.
4. Richard Guzman, ed., Black Writing from Chicago: In the World, Not of It? (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 164.
5. Pat Curry, “Day in the Sun for Raisin Writer Home,” Chicago Tribune, February 10, 2010, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-02-10/news/1002090492_1_landmark-status-landmark-designation-black-family.
6. Lorraine Hansberry Papers (hereafter, Hansberry Papers), Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, box 60, file 15.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Lorraine Hansberry, “The Black Revolution and the White Backlash,” in Black Protest: History, Documents, and Analysis, 1619 to the Present, ed. Joanne Grant (New York: Fawcett Premier, 1968).
13. Melvin Tolson, “Dark Symphony,” in The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry, ed. Rita Dove (New York: Penguin, 2011), 109.
14. Nemiroff, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, 39.
15. Sidney Fields, “Housewife’s Play Is a Hit,” New York Daily Mirror, March 16, 1959.
16. Hansberry Papers, box 1, file 3.
17. James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972), 47.
18. Hansberry Papers, box 2, file 1.
19. Nemiroff, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, 42.
20. Ibid.
21. Englewood High School Yearbook, Hansberry Papers, box 1, file 4.
CHAPTER TWO: FROM HEARTLAND TO THE WATER’S EDGE
1. 1949 Mexico Poem, Hansberry Papers, box 1, file 1.
2. JoAnn Beier letter, Hansberry Papers, box 1, file 5.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Nemiroff, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, 51.
6. “Lorraine Hansberry Talks with Studs Terkel,” on WFMT, May 12, 1959.
7. “1949,” Hansberry Papers, box 1, file 1.
8. “Frank Lloyd Wright,” Hansberry Papers, box 1, file 5.
9. Letter from JoAnn Beier, Hansberry Papers, box 1, file 5.
10. “1949 Mexico Poem,” Hansberry Papers, box 1, file 1.
11. Ibid.
12. JoAnn Beier letter, Hansberry Papers, box 1, file 5.
13. Edythe Cohen letter to Robert Nemiroff, Hansberry Papers, box 1, file 5.
14. Robert Nemiroff letter to Edythe Cohen, Hansberry Papers, box 1, file 4.
15. Lorraine Hansberry letter to Edythe Cohen, Hansberry Papers, box 1, file 5.
CHAPTER THREE: THE GIRL WHO CAN DO EVERYTHING
1. “Tribute Paid the Late Lorraine Hansberry.”
2. Steven R. Carter, Hansberry Drama: Commitment amid Complexity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), viii.
3. Lorraine Hansberry, “Flag from a Kitchenette Window,” Masses and Mainstream 3, no. 9 (1950).
4. Gwendolyn Brooks, “Kitchenette Building,” The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 4–5.
5. “1949,” Hansberry Papers, box 1, file 1.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. “Tribute Paid the Late Lorraine Hansberry.”
9. Lorraine Hansberry letter to Edythe Cohen, Hansberry Papers, box 1, file 5.
10. Lorraine Hansberry, “The Outsider,” Freedom (April 1953).
11. Lorraine Hansberry, “Gold Coast Rulers Go: Ghana Moves to Freedom,” Freedom (December 1951).
12. Lorraine Hansberry letter to Edythe Cohen, Hansberry Papers, box 1, file 5.
13. “Louis Burnham,” Hansberry Papers, box 2, file 13.
14. Lorraine Hansberry, “Lynchsong,” Masses and Mainstream 4, no. 7 (July 1951): 19–20.
15. Jefferson School of Social Science advertisement
, New York Amsterdam News, February 9, 1952.
16. Notes on W. E. B. Du Bois, Hansberry Papers, box 1, file 5.
17. Ibid.
18. “The Frederick Douglass Education Center,” Daily Worker, March 26, 1952.
19. “Homecoming,” Hansberry Papers, box 60, file 9.
20. Ibid.
21. Ralph Ellison, “Harlem Is Nowhere,” Harper’s, August 1964, 57.
22. Ibid.
23. “Homecoming,” Hansberry Papers.
24. Lorraine Hansberry, “A Negro Woman Speaks for Peace,” Sunday Worker, June 22, 1952.
25. “Lorraine Hansberry,” “F.B. Eyes Digital Archive: FBI Files on African American Authors and Literary Institutions Obtained Through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA),” FBI file NY 105–40092, http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/fbeyes/hansberry.
CHAPTER FOUR: BOBBY
1. Hansberry Papers, box 2, file 1.
2. Hansberry Papers, box 1, file 5.
3. Hansberry Papers, box 2, file 1.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Statement by the President Declining to Intervene on Behalf of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, June 19, 1953, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953.
7. Ilene Philipson, Ethel Rosenberg: Beyond the Myths (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 352.
8. David Levering Lewis, Michael Nash, and Daniel J. Leab, eds., Red Activists and Black Freedom: James and Esther Jackson and the Long Civil Rights Movement (London: Routledge, 2013), 96.
9. Ibid.
10. “The Trial of Jomo Kenyatta,” The Reporter, Hansberry Papers, box 63, file 26.
11. Ibid.
12. “Lorraine Hansberry Tribute to Paul Robeson,” Hansberry Papers, box 56, file 20.
13. “My Own Dear Husband,” Hansberry Papers, box 2, file 1.
14. Ibid.
15. Hansberry Papers, box 2, file 1.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Dan Wakefield, New York in the ’50s (New York: Open Road Media, 2016), 157.
21. John Oliver Killens, “The Literary Genius of Alice Childress,” in Black Women Writers 1950–1980: A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1984), 129.
22. Hansberry Papers, box 2, file 1.
23. Hansberry Papers, box 3, file 1.
24. Joan Sandler, a friend of Lorraine’s, was an African American actress and activist in New York.
25. Hansberry Papers, box 1, file 1.
26. Hansberry Papers, box 60, file 2.
27. Ibid.
28. “1956,” Hansberry Papers, box 60, file 2.
29. Ibid.
30. Herman Melville, Moby Dick; or, the White Whale (Boston: St. Botolph Society, 1892), 39.
31. “Annie,” Hansberry Papers, box 50, file 3.
32. “Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex—An American Commentary,” 1957, Hansberry Papers, box 59, file 1.
CHAPTER FIVE: SAPPHO’S POETRY
1. Theresa Cha, Dictee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 1.
2. Hansberry Papers, box 5, file 7.
3. Ladder 1, no. 8 (May 1957): 26.
4. Ibid.
5. Marcia Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis (New York: Seal Press, 2007), 42–43.
6. Hansberry Papers, box 2, file 1.
7. Lorraine Hansberry letter to Robert Nemiroff, Hansberry Papers, box 2, file 1.
8. Ibid.
9. Elise Harris, “The Double Life of Lorraine Hansberry,” OUT Magazine, September 1999.
10. Lorraine Hansberry [Emily Jones, pseud.], “The Anticipation of Eve,” ONE Magazine 6, no. 12 (December 1958): 22.
11. Ibid.
12. Hansberry, “The Anticipation of Eve,” 24.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 25.
15. Ibid., 27.
16. Ibid., 28.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 29.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Hansberry Papers, box 59, file 1.
22. Hansberry, “The Anticipation of Eve,” 29.
23. Hansberry Papers, box 59, file 1.
24. Ibid.
25. Colm Toibin, “The Unsparing Confessions of Giovanni’s Room,” New Yorker, February 26, 2016.
26. Lorraine Hansberry [Emily Jones, pseud.], “Chanson Du Konallis,” Ladder 2, no. 12 (September 1958).
27. Ibid., 6.
28. Ibid., 10.
29. Ibid., 20.
30. Hansberry Papers, box 59, file 1.
31. Gene Smith, “Telling the Truth of People’s Lives,” American Legacy (Spring 1997): 7.
32. Mary Oliver and Molly Malone Cook, Our World (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009), 4.
33. Ibid., 81.
34. “Lorraine Hansberry,” FBI file.
35. Autobiographical Notes, Hansberry Papers, box 1, file 1
CHAPTER SIX: RAISIN
1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), 206.
2. William J. Maxwell, F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 103.
3. “Lorraine Hansberry,” FBI file.
4. Robin Bernstein, “Inventing a Fishbowl: White Supremacy and the Critical Reception of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun,” Modern Drama 42, no. 1 (1999): 23.
5. James Baldwin, “Sweet Lorraine,” The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 444.
6. Ossie Davis, Life Lit by Some Large Vision (New York: Atria Press, 2006), 99.
7. Ibid., 103.
8. Amiri Baraka, “A Wiser Play Than Some of Us Knew,” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 1987.
9. “Lorraine Hansberry,” FBI file.
10. Fields, “Housewife’s Play Is a Hit.”
11. Lorraine Hansberry, “We Have So Much to Say,” transcript of interview with Ted Poston, New York Post, March 22, 1959.
12. Esther Edwards, “Hit a Raisin in the Sun,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 7, 1959.
13. Walter Kerr, “Raisin in the Sun at American,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, February 12, 1961.
14. Lorraine Hansberry, author’s reply, New York Times, June 28, 1959.
15. Lorraine Hansberry, “An Author’s Reflection: Willie Loman, Walter Lee, and He Who Must Live,” Village Voice, August 12, 1959.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Phillip Rose, You Can’t Do That on Broadway (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation, 2001), 150.
23. “Brandeis Lecture,” Hansberry Papers, box 56, file 3.
24. Ibid.
25. “Swarthmore Lecture,” Hansberry Papers, box 56, file 15.
26. Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” Dissent (Fall 1957).
27. Ibid.
28. “Brandeis Lecture.”
29. Lorraine Hansberry, “Thoughts on Genet, Mailer, and the New Paternalism,” Village Voice, June 1, 1961.
30. Ibid., 14.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Langston Hughes letter to Lorraine Hansberry, Hansberry Papers, box 63, file 15.
34. LeRoi Jones letter to Lorraine Hansberry, Hansberry Papers, box 63, file 15.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Harry J. Elam Jr., “Cultural Capital and the Presence of Africa: Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson and the Power of Black Theater,” in The Cambridge History of African American Literature, ed. Maryemma Graham and Jerry Ward Jr. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 685.
38. Lorraine Hansberry, “About Billie Holiday,” New York Post, July 27, 1959.
39. Lorraine Hansberry, “What Could Happen Didn’t,” New York Herald Tribune, Marc
h 26, 1961.
40. Ibid.
41. Original prospectus for the John Brown Theatre (“Toward a Harlem Community Theatre”), Hansberry Papers, box 56, file 12.
CHAPTER SEVEN: THE TRINITY
1. Baldwin, “Sweet Lorraine,” 444.
2. Ruth Feldstein, How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 103.
3. Lorraine Hansberry letter to Robert Nemiroff, Hansberry Papers, box 1, file 1.
4. “Lorraine Hansberry Talks with Studs Terkel.”
5. Baldwin, “Sweet Lorraine,” 444.
6. David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography (New York: Skyhorse, 2015), 195.
7. James Baldwin letter to Lorraine Hansberry, Hansberry Papers, box 63, file 15.
8. Letter from Lorraine Hansberry to James Baldwin, James Baldwin Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, box 3a, folder 20.
9. Smith, “Telling the Truth of People’s Lives.”
10. Baldwin, “Sweet Lorraine,” 443.
11. Ibid.
12. Nathan Glazer, “Liberalism and the Negro: A Round-Table Discussion,” Commentary 37 (March 1, 1964), https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/liberalism-the-negro-a-round-table-discussion. Participants were James Baldwin, Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, and Gunnar Myrdal.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (New York: Samuel French, 1984), 127.
16. James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” The Price of the Ticket, 33.
17. James Baldwin letter to Lorraine Hansberry, Hansberry Papers (2), box 63, file 15.
18. James Baldwin letter to Lorraine Hansberry, Hansberry Papers, box 63, file 15.
19. Nadine Cohodas, Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 138.
20. Ibid., 139.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Nina Simone with Stephen Cleary, I Put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone (orig. 1991; Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003), 87.
24. Joe Hagan, “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” Believer, August 2010.
25. Simone, I Put a Spell on You, 87.
26. Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddam,” Nina Simone Live in Concert, Philips Records, 1964.
