The article that appears below is reprinted from the February 1965 issue of Monthly Review. Despite her small body of work plus short life, Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965) is considered one of the great African-American dramatists of the twentieth century. Her play A Raisin in the Sun (1959) is required reading, plus performed regularly, in high schools plus colleges nationwide, as well as on Broadway plus London’s West End. Hansberry’s association with the left, plus especially with Monthly Review, began in her teenage years. When she moved to New York, she became good friends with Leo Huberman plus Paul M. Sweezy. In spring 1964, although terminally ill with pancreatic cancer, she left her hospital bed to speak at a benefit for Monthly Review Press; her speech appeared posthumously as the article below.
Hansberry was a thoroughgoing socialist plus radical, committing her time plus skills to causes like the peace movement plus the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Indeed, A Raisin in the Sun, which draws on events in her own life, is also a biting critique of capitalism, its corruptions, plus its devastating human cost. Her father, Carl Hansberry—who had some success in Chicago real estate despite being black plus the 1930s depression—was unable to buy a house for his family in a largely white neighborhood because of the then-common restrictive covenants, now called “redlining,” which were used to enforce residential segregation.
He sued plus won an ostensibly landmark case in the U.S. Supreme Court, Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32 (1940) outlawing such covenants. However, the decision was widely ignored or unenforced. As his increasingly radical daughter saw it, the system of residential segregation trumped the legal niceties, leaving the everyday racist reality essentially unaffected by the decision. Moreover, the stress of the long litigation, plus the fierce attacks the senior Hansberry was subjected to by white supremacists in the community, caused his health to break down; he died in 1946 at age fifty. None of this tragedy was lost on his only daughter who saw in this family catastrophe a profound failure of “the system.” In the last decade of her short life, Lorraine Hansberry put her writing talent entirely in service to her radical sensibility plus her search for revolutionary solutions.