NEIGHBORHOOD DIVIDED by Jocelyn Prince, Production Dramaturg

Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the nation. Known as the “city of neighborhoods,” most residents live among those of their own racial background. The historical boundary between white and black, North Side and South Side, provides the setting and context for Lorraine Hansberry’s semi-autobiographical drama, A Raisin in the Sun.

Although blacks have resided in Chicago since the late 18th century, the Great Migration, which spanned 1916 through 1970, brought nearly 500,000 African American residents from the South to the city. Before this migration, considered the greatest non-war related migration in American history, African Americans constituted 2 percent of Chicago’s population; by 1970, they made up 33 percent.

Migrants desperate for better wages, decent housing and escape from the bitter life of sharecropping in an increasingly dangerous South, sought the promise of a better life in the North. National publications like the Chicago Defender characterized Chicago and other northern cities as a “Promised Land” of fair treatment, good paying jobs and freedom from legally sanctioned racial discrimination.

When they arrived, most migrants settled in the Black Belt, an area that extended from Twelfth Street to Seventy-ninth Street and from Wentworth Avenue to Cottage Grove Avenue, and found work in the factories, meatpacking houses and as domestic workers. As the African American population increased, implacable racial residential borders contributed to overcrowded housing, unsanitary conditions and a lack of public services.

Despite the growing housing shortage, white Americans used legal, illegal and sometimes violent means to keep the racial borders around their neighborhoods intact. Many white Chicagoans harbored a virulent terror about living alongside blacks. Racist attitudes fueled a growing fear that an “invasion” of African Americans into white areas would increase crime rates, lower property values and decrease their quality of life.

Institutions also felt threatened by possible changes in their neighborhoods. Board members of the University of Chicago, considered a liberal and progressive institution during the mid-20th century, played a pivotal, but often clandestine role in supporting the restrictive covenants that kept blacks out of the Hyde Park and Woodlawn areas until 1948.

Restrictive covenants were a popular legal method used by white homeowners to prevent particular groups of people, sometimes Jews or Chinese-Americans, but, most-often, African Americans, from moving into historically white neighborhoods. They were contractual agreements among property owners that prohibited the purchase, lease, or occupation of their premises by “undesirables.”

While keeping its real estate practices out of the public eye, the University actively sought to prevent racial integration of the surrounding neighborhoods. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s the University of Chicago subsidized the legal efforts of the Hyde Park Property Owners’ Association and the Oakland-Kenwood Property Owners’ Associa-tion to bar blacks from the area. When criticized, the University’s Chancellor asserted that racially restrictive covenants “were legal instruments” and “Hyde Park residents had the right to invoke and defend them.”

In 1937, University of Chicago Chancellor Robert Maynard Huchins said:

“An examination of the University’s record will, I am sure, convince any fair-minded person that, in determining the policies of the institution, neither the Trustees nor the administrative officers are actuated by race prejudice… however, the University must endeavor to stabilize its neighborhood as an area in which its students and faculty will be content to live.”

In 1937, residents of the Woodlawn neighborhood filed suit against Carl Hansberry, Lorraine Hansberry’s father, and his wife Nannie who had purchased property at 6140 S. Rhodes Ave. Their daughter Lorraine was seven years old at the time.

A portion of the Racial Restrictive Covenant reads:

“…no part of said premises shall be sold, given, conveyed or leased to any negro or negroes, and no permission or license to use or occupy any part thereof shall be given to any negro except house servants or janitors or chauffeurs employed thereon…”

While local and state courts sided with the plaintiffs, in 1940 the United States Supreme Court decided in favor of the Hansberrys (Lee v. Hansberry, 1940), opening up more than 300 properties in the Woodlawn neighborhood to African Americans. Attorney Truman Kella Gibson Jr. served as a member of the Hansberry’s defense team.

In Lee v. Hansberry, the court didn’t strike down racially restrictive covenants as racist and unconstitutional, but ruled on a technical issue. However, the decision laid the groundwork for Shelly v. Kraemer (1948), when the court finally declared the covenants unenforceable.

LORRAINE HANSBERRY by Jocelyn Prince, Production Dramaturg

“I had never in my life seen so many black people in the theater. And the reason was that never before, in the entire history of American theater, had so much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage. Black people ignored the theater because the theater had always ignored them.” –James Baldwin on A Raisin in the Sun

Lorraine Hansberry, playwright and activist, was born on May 19, 1930 in Chicago, Illinois to Carl and Nannie Hansberry, into a family rich with a tradition of political activism and cultural pride from which she drew inspiration for her work.

Although Hansberry’s family was middle-class, her father a real-estate business owner, her family remained confined to the Black Belt, a segregated section of the South Side. When Lorraine was eight years old, the Hansberry family moved into a house in Washington Park, a white neighborhood that bordered the University of Chicago, to challenge housing discrimination practices. They were met with hostility and a violent mob that sent a cement brick through their living room window. When the city of Chicago ordered them to move out, Carl Hansberry, with the aid of the NAACP filed a lawsuit in the state court of Illinois to challenge racist housing practices.

The Hansberrys initially lost their case, and the family returned to the South Side. Despite the overcrowded and segregated school Lorraine attended, she supplemented her education under the guidance of her parents and prominent family friends. W.E.B. Dubois, Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes frequented the Hansberry’s cramped apartment, and both Carl and Nannie’s brothers taught at Howard University in Washington D.C. Lorraine absorbed language, history, racial pride and politics.

After graduating from high school where she won the all-school creative writing contest for one of her short stories, she spent two years at the University of Wisconsin before she left school to move to New York City in 1950. In New York she found work at Freedom, an activist African-American newspaper, engaged in civil rights protests and enrolled in the New School for Social Research. On a picket line organized to protest New York University’s segregated sports programs, she met a Jewish NYU literature student and song writer, Robert Barro Nemiroff. They began dating and married in June of 1953.

Nemiroff supported Lorraine’s writing, and she began writing full time by the summer of 1956. A year later she had finished A Raisin in the Sun and hosted a reading for friends Burt D’Lugoff and Phillip Rose at their apartment. Dazzled by the compelling script, by the end of the evening Rose wanted to produce A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway.

Financing the production proved an uphill battle. At the time, no serious play about African Americans had been produced on Broadway. Lorraine was an unknown playwright and the play lacked a star to ensure ticket sales. Nearly one-hundred and fifty individual investors eventually contributed small amounts to produce tryout performances of the play in New Haven, Philadelphia and Chicago. On March 11, 1959, A Raisin in the Sun opened to wide acclaim at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway. Audiences showered the cast, which included Sidney Portier, Ruby Dee and Claudia McNeil, with standing ovations.

“The play is honest,” wrote Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times. “It is Miss Hansberry’s personal contribution to an explosive situation in which simple honesty is the most difficult thing in the world. And also the most illuminating.” Hansberry became the first African American and the youngest playwright to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Best Dramatic Play award.

Hansberry’s life changed drastically after her success. Her days were filled with speeches, interviews, and civil rights fundraising events. She continued her activism work and wrote a screenplay, a never produced television play, two stage plays (Les Blancs and The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window) and an opera about the Haitian rebel Toussaint L’Overture.

In 1963 Hansberry was diagnosed with cancer but continued to work between hospital stays. Lorraine and Nemiroff separated and divorced in 1964, but continued a professional relationship, and she named him her literary executor. Her body weakened, she watched the New York production of her second staging, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, from a wheelchair in the back of the theatre. This new production about white intellectuals in Greenwich Village received mixed reviews and almost closed a week after opening. But, as Lorraine lay on her deathbed, a committee of volunteers rallied to keep the production alive. They handed out flyers on Broadway and bought radio and newspaper ads. Religious leaders spoke about the play from their pulpits. Cast members took pay cuts. The production ran for an incredible 101 performances and closed the night of Lorraine Hansberry’s death–January 12, 1965.

Nemiroff devoted the rest of his life to keeping her legacy alive. He combed Lorraine’s journals and sketches to publish an “informal autobiography” titled, “To be Young, Gifted, and Black.” Nemiroff also conceived and co-wrote the book for Raisin, which premiered on Broadway in 1974 and won the Tony Award that year for Best Musical.

"Neighborhood Divided " Sources
Winger, Stewart. "Unwelcome Neighbors," Chicago History. 21.1&2 (1992): 56-72.

Waters Jr., Enoc P. “Hansberry Decision Opens 500 New Homes to Race: Court Holds
Covenenants Non Existent” The Chicago Defender. (Nov. 16, 1940).

The Promised Land [Video] 1995, Discovery Communication.

Encyclopedia of Chicago. Chicago Historical Society, The Newberry Library and
Northwestern University: http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org.

"Lorraine Hansberry" Sources
McKissack, Patricia and Frederick L. Mckissack. Young, Black, and Determined: A
Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. New York: Holiday House, 1998.

Sinnott, Susan. Lorraine Hansberry: Award Winning Playwright and Civil Rights
Activist. Berkley, California: Conari Press, 1999.

Scheader, Catherine. Lorraine Hanserry: Playwright and Voice of Justice. Springfield, NJ: Enslow Publishers, Inc., 1998.