Lorraine Hansberry

In the annals of theatre history, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (which had its première in 1959, when she was only twenty-eight) will go down as the first Broadway play written by an African-American woman and directed by an African-American man. It would have been beaten a couple of seasons earlier by Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind if the redoubtable Childress had not refused to allow her would-be producers water down her work, which portrayed the demeaning and frustrating position of Black actors forced into endless ‘yes’m, no sir’ shuck and jive roles.