"Never be afraid to sit awhile and think."
- Lorraine Hansberry
- Lorraine Hansberry
American playwright and painter, whose A RAISIN IN THE SUN (1959) was the first drama by a black woman to be produced on Broadway. It also won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award as the best play of the year. Hansberry's portrayed individuals – not only black – who defend their own and other's dignity. "All art is ultimately social: that which agitates and that which prepares the mind for slumber," she once said.
"... in order for a person to bear his life, he needs a valid re-creation of that life, which is why, as Ray Charles might put it, blacks chose to sing the blues. This is why Raisin in the Sun meant so much to black people - on the stage: the film is another matter. In the theater, a current flowed back and forth between the audience and the actors, flesh and blood corroborating flesh and blood - as we say, testifying... The root argument of the play is really far more subtle than either its detractors or the bulk of its admirers were able to see." (James Baldwin in The Devil Finds Work, 1976)
