{"id":2350,"date":"2018-03-03T14:58:18","date_gmt":"2018-03-03T19:58:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mindfulwalker.com\/?p=2350"},"modified":"2018-03-03T14:58:18","modified_gmt":"2018-03-03T19:58:18","slug":"lorraine-hansberrys-courageous-path","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mindfulwalker.com\/wordpress\/mindful-activist\/lorraine-hansberrys-courageous-path","title":{"rendered":"Lorraine Hansberry\u2019s Courageous Path"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cOur South side is a place apart: each piece of our living is a protest.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Lorraine Hansberry wrote these words about growing up in a segregated neighborhood of Chicago\u2019s South Side in the 1930s. This sentence expresses pain \u2013 and it signals unyielding resistance. In the documentary devoted to Hansberry, Sighted Eyes\/Feeling Heart<\/em><\/a>, a speaker describes the Hansberrys\u2019 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, \u201cstressed out\u201d because of how whites treated them.<\/p>\n

Stressed out.<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Yet the Hansberry family didn\u2019t fold. While, as Hansberry wrote, her family and the people in the segregated neighborhood were \u201ctired,\u201d they were \u201cdetermined to live.\u201d The youngest of four, she was a lively \u201cdaddy\u2019s girl,\u201d 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 \u201cskinny little South side bodies by the fives and tens panting the delicious hours away.\u201d 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cdesperate and courageous,\u201d Lorraine later wrote, guarded their home, holding a loaded pistol, as whites threatened the family.<\/p>\n

“Black and Female”<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s South Side to, ultimately, New York\u2019s 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<\/em>, Hansberry\u2019s dreams, her pain, and her triumph exploded onto the stage.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cI was born black and female.\u201d This identity became core to her life and works.<\/p>\n

\"Lorraine<\/a>