“Our South side is a place apart: each piece of our living is a protest.”

Lorraine Hansberry wrote these words about growing up in a segregated neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side in the 1930s. This sentence expresses pain – and it signals unyielding resistance. In the documentary devoted to Hansberry, Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, a speaker describes the Hansberrys’ experience of living in a ghetto, literally a place that separated people from those in other neighborhoods, in this case strictly by the color of their skin. They were, the speaker observes, “stressed out” because of how whites treated them.

Stressed out. These words stayed with me, long after watching the documentary. These two words took segregation and its brutal reality from a big concept of neighborhoods and millions of people to the real pain and weariness that a single man, woman, or child feels. It stresses you, tires you out, and inflicts constant pain and anxiety.

Yet the Hansberry family didn’t fold. While, as Hansberry wrote, her family and the people in the segregated neighborhood were “tired,” they were “determined to live.” The youngest of four, she was a lively “daddy’s girl,” as the film notes. She remembered the delight of going to the park at night with her family and gazing up at the distant stars. She wrote later of the street games played by “skinny little South side bodies by the fives and tens panting the delicious hours away.” As a child, Hansberry witnessed the fortitude of her father, Carl Hansberry, a successful realtor and businessman, and mother, Nannie Louise (Perry) Hansberry, a former teacher and a political activist, who wouldn’t accept segregation as just the way it is. The Hansberry family purchased a house in the all-white Washington Park subdivision in the South Side’s Woodlawn neighborhood.

This action brought its hardships. As a young girl, Lorraine was cursed at, spat upon, and threatened while walking to school. Her father waged a costly, demanding court battle against racially restrictive property covenants that enforced segregation, and he won a partial victory in the U.S Supreme Court that opened up hundreds of new properties to black residents. While her father was in Washington, D.C., her mother, “desperate and courageous,” Lorraine later wrote, guarded their home, holding a loaded pistol, as whites threatened the family.

“Black and Female”

Out of these beginnings arose a woman of fierce resilience, brilliance, and resolve. Hers was a journey of geography, of her early days in Chicago’s South Side to, ultimately, New York’s Greenwich Village. It was also a geography of the heart and spirit, in which she traveled from the joys and wounds of her childhood and took them with her to create her passions and her fulfillment as a journalist, writer, and playwright. In her play A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry’s dreams, her pain, and her triumph exploded onto the stage.

Her life journey represents truth and art expressed powerfully in the face of discrimination and ignorance, and New York was a crucial, supportive setting for her growth and flowering. Hansberry went from her early years in a place that sought to erase and wall off her family and other black families to one where she could thrive, in her writing and in her life. As she said to a group of black writers at a conference in 1959, “I was born black and female.” This identity became core to her life and works.

Lorraine Hansberry

The juncture of Black History Month and Women’s History Month is a fitting time to honor Hansberry. But in truth, her art, living, and resistance represent something so important and inspirational in the struggles and backlash that continue to plague our world. Here are works and places to trace and honor Hansberry’s life and achievements, from New York City to her home and final resting place in the Hudson Valley.

Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart

In February, PBS opened its 32nd season of the American Masters series by showcasing the extraordinary documentary Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart that delves into Hansberry’s complex life and historic achievements as a playwright, journalist, and activist. This in-depth, beautifully told rendering of her life allows for an understanding of the sources of Hansberry’s passion, joy, creativity, and pain, all of which shaped her expression and genius. Tracy Heather Strain wrote, directed, and co-produced the film. The documentary’s title comes from Hansberry’s keynote address to the first conference of black writers in New York, in 1959: “One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know or react to the miseries which afflict this world.”

The film is poignant and powerful in examining Hansberry’s writing and activism for racial justice. It gives less attention to her life as a lesbian who first married a Jewish activist, Robert Nemiroff, a marriage ending in divorce. A sense of her relationships with women – she spoke of the realities of “heterosexually married lesbians” – and her writings under a pseudonym are not explored in the documentary as deeply. This part of Hansberry’s was beyond public view, in an era when many lesbians and gay men were threatened and remained closeted while forming strong bonds in their separate communities. Edie Windsor, the pioneer lesbian activist, recalls Hansberry as a lovable, delightful woman of incredible intelligence.

Though the free online streaming has ended, the documentary is available with a PBS Passport membership. Also, the American Masters site offers other resources, such as a timeline and biography; eight moving quotations from A Raisin in the Sun; and a film segment about the groundbreaking casting of the play. In addition, a Facebook page for Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart has posts about public screenings of the film and related material.

Harlem and Greenwich Village

Hansberry showed signs of becoming an activist and artist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At the age of 20, she left college and moved to New York City. She first lived and worked in Harlem, becoming a writer on the journal Freedom, which Paul Robeson and Louis E. Burnham founded. Hansberry wrote about civil rights in the United States and about the campaigns against colonialism and imperialism in Africa. She became involved in helping those in Harlem who were evicted from their apartments.

Upon the marriage to Nemiroff in 1953, the couple moved to Greenwich Village. In the Greenwich Village of the 1950s, Hansberry found a neighborhood and communities that fed and sustained her politically, socially, personally, and intellectually. She and Nemiroff settled in a two-story walkup, at 337 Bleecker Street. She turned increasingly to writing for theater while doing freelance journalism and odd jobs to support her work. As the film explains, she could watch theater performances on a dozen small stages in the Village in the mid-1950s.

While living in the Village, she completed A Raisin in the Sun. It was an extraordinary portrayal of the life of a black man and his working-class family in Chicago’s South Side and their efforts to break free of the confines of discrimination and buy a house in a white neighborhood. It was the first play written by a black female to be performed on Broadway. Opening on Broadway on March 11, 1959, it ran for 530 performances, first at the Ethel Barrymore Theater and then at the Belasco Theater, and brought Hansberry acclaim and success. Hansberry won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, becoming the first African-American playwright and the youngest to do so.

The scenes of Sidney Poitier in Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart are moving and riveting as he talks about how the play broke so many barriers, as are film segments of A Raisin in the Sun showing Poitier and the storied cast. Hansberry’s trailblazing work opened up a world for audiences in its real-world depiction of what everyday black families faced. It also broke open the theater world for black actors and actresses, who had previously only been given stereotypical roles. As Poitier said in documentary footage, “The theater was not a comforting place for us.”

Hansberry bought a building at 112 Waverly Place in 1960. Three years before, she and Nemiroff had separated. Nemiroff obtained a divorce from Hansberry in 1964, in Mexico, although they remained close until her death. She became a member of a pathbreaking lesbian group, the Daughters of Bilitis, and wrote letters and short stories, under pseudonyms, that were published in The Ladder, the group’s journal.

The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation (GVSHP) has honored Hansberry and her life in Greenwich Village in various ways. The society placed a historic plaque on the Waverly Place home. You can also see the building and read her bio on the GVSHP’s Civil Rights and Social Justice Map, and walk past it today knowing of its place in history.

Croton-on-Hudson

Hansberry moved to a house on a wooded property in the Hudson Valley village of Croton-on-Hudson, in 1962. Writing full-time, she sought a quieter life from the constant social activity of the Village and a place to train her dog, according to the documentary. Images from home films show her in the yard. The Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust maintains an incredible trove of resources about and images of Hansberry’s work and life, including a sketch showing the woods near her Croton-on-Hudson home. Within the sketch is a sign on a tree that Hansberry had affixed, with the name she gave to the place, “Chitterling Heights.”

It was after buying this home in Croton-on-Hudson that Hansberry suffered attacks of abdominal pain. She was diagnosed with cancer, though the doctors only told her she had anemia and ulcers. Hansberry kept working on a number of projects as much as possible. In 1964, she authored and published a documentary history of the civil rights movement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). After a valiant struggle and treatment in New York City, she died of pancreatic cancer on January 12, 1965, at age 34. She is buried in Bethel Cemetery in Croton-on-Hudson.

The passage on the gravestone is from her play The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, and it’s the voice of an unflinching soul:

“I care. I care about it all. It takes too much energy not to care. The why we are here is an intrigue for adolescents. The how is what must command the living which is why I have lately become an insurgent again.”

Some 600 people attended her memorial service at the Church of the Master in Harlem, braving a blizzard, as a film timeline details. Ruby Dee and Shelley Winters spoke, and Paul Robeson gave the eulogy. A speaker read a telegram from Martin Luther King Jr., which said that Hansberry’s “creative ability and her profound grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today will remain an inspiration to generations yet unborn.” In the letter of condolences that he sent to the Hansberry family and Nemiroff, James Baldwin wrote, “I think we must resolve not to fail her, for she certainly did not fail us.”

This is a call to be heeded in our troubling times.