Les Blancs (3 page)

Margaret B. Wilkerson, Hansberry’s biographer, has brought to her work in researching Hansberry’s life a thorough approach and respect for the process, and humility in having the responsibility for presentation and treatment of the artist as a private person and creator. Highly capable and creative, Wilkerson, through her knowledge of Hansberry, of her times, of the African American experience, and of the theater, helps immeasurably to fill the void of Bob’s loss.

Chiz Schultz, one of the original producers of
To Be Young, Gifted and Black
and sensitive stage, film, and TV producer, has continued to sustain and support my work. A man of total integrity, he too enriches the arts by his professionalism and his private commitment.

I am grateful to Max Eisen, Bob’s press agent, who has never failed to answer any call from me for advice or help. And my friends Lovette Harper and Sophie and Joe LaRusso for fidelity.

And Edith Gordon, Bob’s—and my—more than friend and mentor, who spoiled him shamelessly because she loved him.

Finally my family: I am grateful to the Nemiroffs who closed ranks around me on my husband’s death to uplift and sustain me.
My special thanks to Mili and Leo; David and Helene; David Lyons and Sandra Nemiroff Lyons, and Matthew Lyons.

My sister, Hattie Handy Manning, who has always promptly undertaken to support whatever I have attempted to do through the years; my brother, Albert Handy, his wife, Cathy and children Alicia, Cathy, Albert, and Lizzie; and my nephew Paul Nunn and his wife, Vanessa, for their care. Thanks also to Marty Nunn.

Multifold gratitude to our daughter, Joi Gresham, creative in her own right and imbued with a sense of purpose and direction of which Bob was very proud. Thanks also to my son-in-law, Timothy Conant, and joyous appreciation to my grandchildren Joshua Malik Gresham-Conner and Mariah Jewell Gresham-Conant for existing.

Lastly, my deep gratitude to my husband’s closest friends, who have helped to fill the void in my life: Dr. Burton D’Lugoff, who loved Lorraine Hansberry and Robert Nemiroff and fought vainly in the final illness of each to wrest each back to this side of life. Thanks also to his wife, Marian, who supported him and us.

And to Ann and Ernie Lieberman, who are always by my side with laughter, and nostalgia, warm memories, and a zest for life that is contagious and an ongoing tribute to Bob, whom they loved, and to me, whom they welcomed into so beautiful and charmed a circle.

—J
EWELL
H
ANDY
G
RESHAM
N
EMIROFF
Croton-on-Hudson, New York
May 1994

The Black Arts movement of the 1960s seemed to burst on the American theatrical scene with no warning. The plays of LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), Ed Bullins, and others appeared, it seemed, from nowhere, called forth from hidden reserves of anger deep within the black community. Few had recognized the strains of militance in the earlier voice of Lorraine Hansberry. Only in hindsight do we now realize that Hansberry heralded the new movement and, in fact, became one of its major literary catalysts. The commercial success and popularity of her first play masked her radical politics and seemed to align her with “integrationism” rather than the muscular voice of Malcolm X. Suppression of other works robbed the public of her insights and her warnings of the cataclysmic civic revolts to come. However, writings that emerged after her death confirmed the vigor of her challenge to the status quo. Only now, in retrospect, do we begin to comprehend her significance as an American, a black, and a woman writer.

She was born in 1930 and died of cancer in 1965. Yet during her scant thirty-four years of life, she made an indelible mark on American theater. She was the first black playwright and the youngest of any color to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for the Best Play of the Year, earning it for her first play,
A Raisin in the Sun
. The drama, which opened on Broadway in 1959, was a landmark success and was subsequently translated into over thirty languages on all continents, including the language of the former East Germany’s Sorbische minority, and produced in such diverse countries as the former Czechoslovakia, England, France, Kenya, the former Soviet Union, Mongolia, and Japan. The play became a popular film in 1961, a Tony Award-winning musical in 1973, and a highly
successful television drama produced on American Playhouse in 1989, starring Danny Glover and Esther Rolle.

Her brief life yielded five plays (one of which was completed by her former husband and literary executor, the late Robert Nemiroff), and more than sixty magazine and newspaper articles, plays, poems, and speeches. She also wrote the text for
The Movement
, a photographic essay on the Civil Rights Movement.
To Be Young, Gifted and Black
, based on her life, toured the country after her death, playing to thousands on campuses and in communities, and adding a new and vital phrase to the American idiom. An activist artist, she spoke at Civil Rights rallies, writers’ conferences, and confronted then-U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy in a controversial meeting with black leaders about the role of the FBI in the Deep South. Her significance, however, does not rest solely on these activities nor even on her record of productivity. Hansberry is important because of her incisive, articulate, and sensitive exposure of the dynamic, troubled American culture. That she, a black artist, could tell painful truths to a society unaccustomed to rigorous self-criticism and still receive its praise is testimony to her artistry.

Lorraine Hansberry was born into material comfort on the South Side of Chicago, and grew up as part of the middle class. But while she was privy to opportunities denied others, she was subject to the same dangers and discrimination that plagued other blacks in segregated Chicago. In order for her family to purchase a home in a previously all-white neighborhood, her father had to wage a legal battle all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. When the family finally moved in, the home was attacked by a racist mob—a brick hurled through the window narrowly missed the eight-year-old Lorraine. Earlier she had lived in a ghetto, the product of rigid housing segregation that kept all blacks, regardless of income, confined to the same neighborhood. She went to public school and made friends with other black children whose families were not as well off as hers, and never forgot the lessons she learned from them. There are no easy generalizations about her early life, except those intended to justify simplistic views. The comfort to which she was born is only relative when one looks at the whole of American life; it did not isolate her from the struggles and the anger of poor people.

Although her plays are not wholly autobiographical, the origins of their themes can be found in several important facts from her childhood and youth. According to Hansberry, the truth of her life and essence begins in the Chicago ghetto where she was born:

From her parents she learned to have pride in the family and never to betray the race. But she also learned that freedom and equality for her people were not likely to come through the American democratic way. She had seen her father spend a small fortune fighting the restrictive covenants of Chicago, then die a permanently embittered exile in a foreign country, disillusioned by the intransigence of racism. She had little desire for the materialism characteristic of her class since her kindergarten days when she was beaten up by classmates: her mother had dressed her in white fur—in the middle of the Depression. She came to respect the pugnacity of her peers, children from the ghetto who were not afraid to fight and to defend themselves. From these and other early experiences, she developed a deep empathy for the desires and frustrations of her people, and a respect for their beauty and vigor.

In 1948, she attended the University of Wisconsin, where she joined and led the Young Progressives of America and later the Labor Youth League, politically left organizations that offered a forum for her progressive views. But after two years, she left the University to find an education of a different kind. Moving to New York City, she took a job as a journalist on the progressive Negro paper
Freedom
, whose editorial board was chaired by Paul Robeson. Here she began to refine her writing skills and to clarify her political views. She came to know some of the greatest black literary and activist figures of her time, among them W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Robeson.

They became the artistic and philosophical reference points for her later works. She would credit the
Freedom
editor, Louis Burnham, with teaching her: “That all racism was rotten, white or black, that
everything
is political; that people tend to be indescribably beautiful and uproariously funny. He also taught me that they have enemies who are grotesque and that freedom lies in the recognition of all of that and other things.”
²
It was at this point in her life that she consciously decided to be a writer.

As a black writer, Hansberry was caught in a paradox of expectations. She was expected to write about that which she “knew best,” the black experience, and yet that expression was doomed to be called parochial and narrow. Hansberry, however, challenged these facile categories and forced a redefinition of the term “universality,” one which would include the dissonant voice of an oppressed American minority. As a young college student, she had wandered into a rehearsal of Sean O’Casey’s
Juno and the Paycock
. Hearing in the wails and moans of the Irish characters a universal cry of human misery, she determined to capture that sound in the idiom of her own people—so that it could be heard by all. “One of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing,” she would later conclude, “is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is.… In other words, I think people, to the extent we accept them and believe them as who they’re supposed to be, to that extent they can become everybody.”
³
Such a choice by a black writer posed an unusual challenge to the literary establishment and a divided society ill-prepared to comprehend its meaning.

“All art is ultimately social: that which agitates and that which prepares the mind for slumber,” Hansberry argued, attacking another basic tenet held by traditional critics. One of the most fundamental illusions of her time and culture, she believed, is the idea that art is not and should not make a social statement. The belief in “l’art pour l’art” permeates literary and theatrical criticism, denying the integral relationship between society and art. “The writer is deceived who thinks he has some other choice. The question is not whether one will make a social statement in one’s work—but only
what
the statement will say, for if it says anything at all, it will be social.”
⁴

It would have been impossible for a person of her background and sensitivity to divorce herself from the momentous social and political events of the 1950s and 1960s. This period witnessed the beginning of a Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet superpowers, a rising demand by blacks for civil rights at home, and a growing intransigence by colonized peoples throughout the world. Isolation is the enemy of black writers, Hansberry believed; they are obligated to participate in the intellectual and social affairs of humankind everywhere.

This abhorrence for narrowness and parochialism led her to examine the hidden alliance between racism and sexism long before it was popular to do so, and to shape a vision cognizant of the many dimensions of colonialism and oppression. Anticipating the women’s movement of the 1970s, Hansberry was already aware of the peculiar oppression under which women lived and the particular devastation visited upon women of color.

With the statement “I was born black and a female,”
⁵
Hansberry immediately established the basis for a tension that informed her world view. Her consciousness, of both ethnicity and gender from the very beginning, brought awareness of two key forces of conflict and oppression in the contemporary world. Because she embraced these dual truths despite their implicit competition for her attention (a competition exacerbated by external pressures), her vision was expansive enough to contain and even synthesize what to others would be contradictions. Thus, she was amused in 1955 at progressive friends who protested whenever she posed “so much as an itsy-bitsy analogy between the situation, say, of the Negro people in the U.S.—and women.” She was astonished to be accused by a woman of being bitter and of thinking that men are beasts simply because she expressed the view that women are oppressed. “Must I hate ‘men’ any more than I hate ‘white people’—because some of them are savage and others commit savage acts,” she asked herself. “Of course not!” she answered vehemently.
⁶

This recognition of the tension implicit in her blackness and femaleness was the starting point for her philosophical journey from the South Side of Chicago to the world community. The following quote charts that journey and the expansion of Hansberry’s consciousness, which is unconstrained by culture and gender, but which at the same time refuses to diminish the importance of either.