Lorraine Hansberry Speaks Out on Art and the Black Revolution

Lorraine Hansberry

(1930 - 1965)

"The Blackness Revolution and the White Backlash"
Forum at Town Hall sponsored past The Association of Artists for Liberty

New York City - June 15, 1964

Lorraine Hansberry

In 1959, playwright Lorraine Hansberry made history every bit the showtime black woman to accept a evidence produced on Broadway. The play was A Raisin in the Lord's day, a story near a black working-class family in Chicago trying to escape the ghetto. At the time, well-nigh people thought a play about African Americans would be a box office flop. Instead, Raisin was a hitting. It ran on Broadway for 19 months, was made into a pic starring Sidney Poitier in 1961, and is now considered a classic of the American theater.

For writer James Baldwin, the virtually hitting thing nearly the play was what it did for African Americans. "I had never in my life seen and then many black people in the theater," he wrote. "And the reason was that never before, in the unabridged history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage. Blackness people had ignored the theater because the theater had always ignored them."¹ Hansberry'southward success helped open doors for scores of black writers and artists who followed, both in theater and the wider cultural mainstream.

Lorraine Hansberry was born in 1930. She grew upwardly on the south side of Chicago, a place rigidly segregated by race. In 1937, Hansberry's parents challenged Chicago's restrictive housing covenants by moving into an all-white neighborhood. Whites fought dorsum. A mob gathered around the house and someone threw a brick, barely missing immature Lorraine's head. Years later, in a letter to The New York Times, Hansberry recalled her mother "patrolling the house all night with a loaded High german luger," while her male parent was away fighting the battle in court.²

Working closely with the NAACP, Hansberry's father took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and eventually won. The ruling in Hansberry v. Lee helped to outlaw housing discrimination across the state. Still, the legal victory proved no match for Chicago'south entrenched racism; blacks and whites remained apart.

Hansberry's parents, Carl and Nannie, were prominent members of their customs and often hosted African American luminaries who came through town. The couple were die-hard Republicans, but it was two of their left-wing guests - Westward. Due east. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson – who came to have a deep influence on their daughter'due south political views.³

When Hansberry moved to New York Urban center in 1950, Robeson gave Hansberry her starting time "real" job as a writer for his new newspaper, Liberty. The publication had a stiff socialist bent and Hansberry declared optimistically to a friend that information technology would go "the periodical of Negro liberation."⁴ Du Bois also wrote articles for the newspaper and taught Hansberry African history at the Jefferson Schoolhouse of Social Science, a Marxist school close down by the U.S. regime at the elevation of the McCarthy era.^v Du Bois and Robeson were dogged by anti-communist forces, merely Hansberry – yet relatively unknown - escaped the same persecution.

Hansberry's 1959 success with Raisin gave her a prominent phonation in the struggle for blackness liberation. She delivered this speech at the Boondocks Hall forum in 1964. The memory of her father'due south failure to milkshake segregation through legal ways shaped her plea for action. Having tried "respectable" means to boxing injustice, she said, information technology was time to get radical.

The forum was sponsored by the Association of Artists for Freedom, a loose coalition of well-known blackness performers and writers that included Sidney Poitier, James Baldwin, and actress Ruby Dee. One of the founders, Ossie Davis, told The New York Times, "Nosotros meet from time to talk and contend…about what we every bit artists tin practise, how we can express the anguish for the moral situation we find in this country, but not as civil rights pleaders."⁶

The Town Hall forum was designed for white liberals and black activists to have an open conversation about tensions mounting betwixt them in the civil rights movement. Charles Silberman, one of the white panelists, described the strain in a book he published in early 1964: "[W]hen the struggle for Negro rights moves into the streets, the majority of [white] liberals are reluctant to motion forth with information technology. They are all for the Negroes' objectives, they say, but they cannot get along with the ways."⁷ During the forum Hansberry blasted this reluctance, declaring, "Nosotros have to find some manner with these dialogues to evidence and to encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and get an American radical."

Writing in her journal two days after, Hansberry described the event as explosive: "Negroes are so angry and white people are so dislocated and sensitive to criticism."⁸ The blackness panelists included writers Paule Marshall, John O. Killens and Leroi Jones, forth with actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. James Wechsler, a columnist for the New York Postal service, was another of the white panelists. He wrote that the Association of Artists for Freedom was "ambushing convict white liberals."⁹ Meanwhile, Nat Hentoff argued in the Hamlet Phonation that the white panel members were "estranged from Negro reality." He said Wechsler "simply did not accept the capacity to really listen to what was beingness said."^x

During the Town Hall forum, Lorraine Hansberry was contesting more than than ideas -she was fighting cancer. Her body was beginning to whither and she was on painkillers. Robert Nemiroff, her one-time husband, says she "rose from a sickbed," determined to participate in the forum and "prepare forth the demand for a new militancy and a radically new human relationship between Blacks and Whites in the freedom struggle."¹¹

Privately though, Hansberry worried she was becoming a coward. "Do I remain a revolutionary?" she wrote in her periodical. "Intellectually – without a dubiety. But am I prepared to give my body to the struggle or even my comforts?...Comfort has come to be its own abuse."¹² In July of 1964, Hansberry wrote that when she regained her health she might travel to the Southward "to find out what kind of revolutionary I am."¹³

Hansberry never got the chance. She died on January 12, 1965, at the age of 34.

How do you talk about 300 years in four minutes? [sighs, laughter, applause] Was information technology ever then apparent we demand this dialogue? [laughter, adulation]

I wrote a letter to the New York Times recently which didn't get printed, which is getting to be my rapport with the New York Times. They said that information technology was too personal. What information technology concerned itself with was, I was in a bit of a stew over the stall-in, considering when the stall-in was outset appear, I said, "Oh, My God, now everybody's gone crazy, you know, tying up traffic. What's the thing with them? Y'all know. Who needs information technology?" And then I noticed the reaction, starting in Washington and coming on up to New York among what nosotros are all here calling the white liberal circles which was something like, yous know, "You Negroes act right or you're going to ruin everything nosotros're trying to practise." [laughter] And that got me to thinking more seriously about the strategy and the tactic that the stall-in intended to accomplish.

And and so I sat down and wrote a letter to the New York Times about the fact that I am of a generation of Negroes that comes later a whole lot of other generations and my begetter, for case, who was, you know, real "American" type American: successful businessman, very civic-minded and and then along; was the sort of American who put a great deal of money, a great deal of his really extraordinary talents and a corking deal of passion into everything that we say is the American way of going later on goals. That is to say that he moved his family into a restricted area where no Negroes were supposed to alive and then proceeded to fight the case in the courts all the fashion to the Supreme Courtroom of the The states. And this cost a great bargain of money. It involved the aid of NAACP attorneys and so on and this is the way of struggling that anybody says is the proper way to practice and it eventually resulted in a decision against restrictive covenants which is very famous, Hansberry 5. Lee. And that was very much applauded.

But the problem is that Negroes are just as segregated in the city of Chicago now equally they were then [laughter] and my father died a disillusioned exile in another country. That is the reality that I'm faced with when I get upward and I read that some Negroes my own historic period and younger say that we must at present prevarication down in the streets, tie up traffic, cease ambulances, do any we can, take to the hills if necessary with some guns and fight dorsum, y'all see. This is the departure.

And I wrote to the Times and said, you know, "Can't you understand that this is the perspective from which we are at present speaking? It isn't every bit if we got up today and said, you know, 'what tin can we practice to irritate America?' " [laughter] you know. It's considering that since 1619, Negroes take tried every method of communication, of transformation of their situation from petition to the vote, everything. Nosotros've tried it all. There isn't anything that hasn't been exhausted. Isn't it rather remarkable that we tin can talk virtually a people who were publishing newspapers while they were notwithstanding in slavery in 1827, yous come across? We've been doing everything, writing editorials, Mr. Wechsler, for a long time, you know. [applause]

And now the charge of impatience is simply unbearable. I would like to submit that the problem is that, yes, at that place is a trouble well-nigh white liberals. I think there'south something horrible that Norman Podhoretz, for instance, can sit down and write the kind of trash that he did at this 60 minutes. [applause] That is to say that a distinguished American thinker can literally say that he is more disturbed at the sight of a mixed couple or that anti-Semitism from Negroes – and anti-Semitism from anybody is horrible and icky and I don't care where information technology comes from – only anti-Semitism, somehow, from a Negro apparently upsets him more than it would from a German language fascist, you lot meet. This was the implication of what really gets to him. [applause] Well, you have to understand that when we are confronted with that, we wonder who we are talking to and how far we are going to go.

The problem is we have to notice some way with these dialogues to bear witness and to encourage the white liberal to terminate existence a liberal and become an American radical. [applause] I think that then it wouldn't – when that becomes truthful, some of the really eloquent things that were said before about the basic fabric of our society, which later on all, is the thing which must be changed, yous know, [adulation] to really solve the trouble, you lot know. The basic organization of American society is the thing that has Negroes in the situation that they are in and never allow united states of america lose sight of it.

When we then talk with that understanding, it won't be so difficult for people similar Mr. Wechsler, whose sincerity I wouldn't dream of challenging, when I say to him [laughter] – his sincerity is ane thing, I don't have to agree with his position. But it wouldn't be so difficult for me to say, well, now, when someone uses the term "cold war liberal" that information technology is entirely different, you come across, the way that y'all would assess the Vietnamese war and the way that I would because I can't believe … [applause] I can't believe that anyone who is given what an American Negro is given – you know, our viewpoint – can believe that a government which has at its disposal a Federal Agency of Investigation which cannot ever observe the murderers of Negroes and by that method… [applause] and shows that information technology cares really very piddling about American citizens who are blackness, really are over somewhere fighting a war for a agglomeration of other colored people, you know, [laughter] several thousand miles – you only have a different viewpoint.

This is why we want the dialogue, to explain that to you, you lot encounter. It isn't a question of patriotism and loyalty. My brother fought for this state, my grandpa before that and so on and that's all a lot of nonsense when nosotros criticize. The point is that nosotros have a different viewpoint considering, you know, we've been kicked in the face so often and the vantage point of Negroes is entirely unlike and these are some of the things we're trying to say. I don't desire to go past my fourth dimension. Thank yous. [applause]

greenandso1943.blogspot.com

Source: http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/blackspeech/lhansberry.html

Share this post