With one’s voice, you can fight anything you want to fight. Randall MacLowry is fighting to tell the story of Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun.
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Last week we mourned the death of Maya Angelou, a towering literary figure who first gained recognition in 1969 with the publication of her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. In a New York Times piece, poet Elizabeth Alexander recalled a phrase that she described as often attributed to Ms. Angelou: “If you have a song to sing, who are you not to open your mouth and sing to the world?”
This idea of the power of voice resonates with me. I am producing, along with my wife and filmmaking partner, Tracy Heather Strain, and filmmaker Jamila Wignot, a documentary about another literary giant who had a song to sing—artist and activist Lorraine Hansberry, best known for writing the play A Raisin in the Sun.
While Angelou and Hansberry were contemporaries and connected to similar circles of friends and colleagues, there is little information of them meeting. Both hailed from the mid-West—Hansberry from Chicago’s South Side and Angelou, two years older, from St. Louis—and they both found their way to New York City in the 1950s. In her memoir The Heart of a Woman, Angelou wrote about a despondent time when she was singing in a little Lower East Side club while people she admired “were doing important things.” One was Lorraine Hansberry who “had a play on Broadway which told some old truths about the black American Negro family to a new white audience.”
Later Angelou recalled Hansberry and other prominent intellectual and cultural figures, including John Killens, Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, at opening night of a musical revue she produced, directed and starred in called “Cabaret for Freedom” at the Village Gate in New York City. That was in 1960. Four years later, at age 34, Hansberry died of cancer during the run of her second Broadway play. One can only imagine how the lives of these two great writers might have intertwined had Hansberry lived longer. During their time, however, they both changed the world through the power of their words and commitment to social justice.
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Tracy and I, along with executive producer Chiz Schultz, have been working on this documentary about Lorraine Hansberry for nearly a decade. It a major part of our Lorraine Hansberry Documentary Project, a nonfiction transmedia storytelling initiative. Still, I feel like a Hansberry neophyte. Chiz was one of the producers of the original 1969 off-Broadway production To Be Young, Gifted and Black, a play adapted from Hansberry’s writings by her ex-husband Robert Nemiroff. Tracy caught the Hansberry “bug” at age seventeen when she saw a production of To Be Young, Gifted and Black at the community theater in her hometown of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. That experience was the seed that led to her becoming a filmmaker. When Tracy asked me to join her on this journey, I, like many people, had read the play or seen the movie of A Raisin in the Sun, but knew little of its author. What I have learned is that Lorraine Hansberry has much more to tell us that just what she wrote in that play.
Hansberry was a courageous and outspoken artist and activist at a time when women were meant to be content to support the aspirations of their husbands. One of the headlines about her success read, “Housewife’s Play Is A Hit.” That was just one of the boxes people tried to put her into. When challenged, however, she didn’t back down, tangling with the likes of Mike Wallace, David Susskind, Norman Mailer and Robert Kennedy.
A case in point was when Mike Wallace, interviewing Hansberry soon after she received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best play, patronizingly asked, “Is it fair to say that even in proportion, very few Negroes have distinguished themselves as playwrights, novelists, and poets? There have been a few, including yourself, but not many. How come?” Her reply: “Whether they’ve distinguished themselves is kind of difficult to discuss, because we always have to keep in mind the circumstances and the framework that Negroes do anything in America, which of course is a hostile circumstance. We’ve been writing poetry since, you know, the 17th century in this country, and publishing; been writing plays that simply never see the light of day because the circumstance, as I say, is hostile.”
Often positioned as an integrationist after A Raisin in the Sun debuted on Broadway, her message was much more revolutionary and radical. In our interview with Douglas Turner Ward, Hansberry’s longtime friend and one of the founders of the Negro Ensemble Company, he said: “I don’t know how much people want to acknowledge it, but Lorraine wasn’t just a conventional mainstream radical. Lorraine was a left-wing radical.”
Hansberry rebelled against the categories people wanted to impose on her art and her life. Her sudden fame gave her a platform to reach thousands with her uncompromising public calls for social justice, gender equality and an end to racial discrimination. She was a vocal and articulate feminist, as well as closeted lesbian who had separated from her husband even before A Raisin in the Sun’s premiere, and later secretly divorced. Controversially for some, her second Broadway play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, only had one black character, focusing instead on a white Jewish intellectual committed to fighting injustice.
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For me, Lorraine Hansberry, like Maya Angelou, stands as a courageous role model and inspiration for today’s young audiences struggling to find their own voice and place in society. She took her voice and put it on a stage for us all to hear. She made a difference. Her great friend writer James Baldwin wrote, “Lorraine made no bones about asserting that art has a purpose, and that its purpose was action.”
After A Raisin in the Sun opened, Hanberry spoke about her own aspirations: “I suppose I think that the highest gift that man has is art, and I am audacious enough to think of myself as an artist.” She went on to say how she wanted “to reach a little closer to the world, which is to say, to people, and see if we can share some illuminations together about each other.” Her desire to see the fuller picture of humanity, and her optimistic belief in that potential continues to inspire me daily.
At Hansberry’s funeral, Martin Luther King, Jr. sent a message, which was read at the service. He wrote, “Her creative ability and her profound grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today will remain an inspiration to generations yet unborn.” Some of Hansberry’s inspiration is on display in schools across the country. A Raisin in the Sun is one of the most read plays in secondary schools, colleges and universities. My brother has been teaching high school English for 20 years, and includes A Raisin in the Sun in his 10th grade curriculum. In asking him why he teaches that play, he told me, “Like all classic literature, it speaks to fifteen year olds now as much as it spoke to the entire nation fi years ago, and challenges us all to think about race and gender in profound ways. The play also forces the audience to think about universal connections to family, and what it means to take responsibility and become a man.”
We are working to complete our documentary by next year, the 50th anniversary of Lorraine Hansberry’s death, and recently received a highly competitive production grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We are in the last three weeks of a Kickstarter campaign of $100,000 to raise some of the additional money we need to finish the film. Kickstarter is an all or nothing fundraising model, so our entire goal must be raised, or the project receives none of the money already pledged. We deeply believe in the power of Hansberry’s distinctive and commanding voice to speak to audiences. Help us share her voice with new generations: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thstrain/hansberrydoc.
Documentary producer Randall MacLowry on Lorraine Hansberry’s voice from The Film Posse on Vimeo.