43. Lorraine Hansberry — A Raisin in the Sun with Dr. Soyica Diggs Colbert

KIM: Amy, The Washington Post called the work we’re going to be discussing today, “one of a handful of great American plays—it belongs in the inner circle, along with Death of a Salesman, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and The Glass Menagerie.”

AMY: Yes, and while its author is certainly not lost, per se, our guest today has uncovered a lot more about her and her still-very-relevant work. 

KIM: Right, and so, not to leave you in too much suspense, the play is A Raisin in the Sun and the playwright is Lorraine Hansberry. Our guest today, Dr. Soyica Diggs Colbert, has written an incredible new biography on Hansberry called Radical Vision which came out in April. 

AMY: It’s actually the first scholarly biography of Hansberry which is kind of amazing given the play’s cultural impact.  

KIM: Right, and that’s just one of the reason’s Dr. Colbert’s book is so important. Among other things, it contextualizes Lorraine Hansberry within the Black radical movement. 

AMY: I can’t wait another second to talk about Hansberry, the play, and this fascinating biography, so let’s raid the stacks and get started! 

[Opening theme music plays] 

KIM: So, as we said, today’s guest is Dr. Soyica Diggs Colbert. She is the Interim Dean of Georgetown College at Georgetown University, as well as the Idol Family Professor of African American Studies and Performing Arts. She is also an Associate Director at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington. In addition to her new biography on Hansberry, Dr. Colbert has written several other books and articles, and she’s currently working on the co-written volume, Black Existentialism.

AMY: Dr. Colbert has served as a dramaturg for productions at Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage of the work we’re discussing today, A Raisin in the Sun. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, and her research interests span the 19th through 21st centuries, from Harriet Tubman to Beyoncé, and from poetics to performance. We’re so glad to have her on the show today. Welcome, Dr. Colbert!  

DR. SOYICA COLBERT: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here!

KIM: Dr. Colbert, I want to start off our discussion by telling our listeners that if they look through my copy of your book, they would see so much highlighting and underlining. It’s a biography, but Radical Vision is packed with ideas and I could almost feel my mind expanding with every sentence. There’s so much to talk about, so we thought we’d start off with a recap of Lorraine Hansberry’s life as our entry point. Amy, do you want to give it a go?

AMY: Absolutely. Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born in Chicago in 1930; she was one of four children, and the baby of the family by seven years. Her mom was a schoolteacher and her father was a successful real estate broker. Both parents were active in the civil rights movement and contributed large sums of money to the NAACP and the Urban League. Then in 1938, Hansberry's family moved to a white neighborhood where they were attacked by a violent mob of their so-called “neighbors.” Among other things, the mob threw a concrete mortar through their window, almost hitting 7-year old Hansberry. Her family refused to move, though, until a court ordered them to do so, and this case made it to the Supreme Court. It was called Hansberry v. Lee — the court ruled, ultimately, against the restrictive covenants in this case, and they were later made illegal. Is that right, Soyica?

SOYICA: That’s absolutely right, and although Hansberry’s father won the battle, they lost the war, because the Supreme Court found that the Hansberrys, it was legal for them to buy that house in that neighborhood, but they did not rule that racially restrictive housing covenants were illegal in general.

AMY: Okay, got it. So this whole traumatic experience with hostile neighbors figures into the plot of Hansberry’s most well-known work, A Raisin in the Sun, which we will be discussing a bit later on. And as a young adult, Hansberry broke with family tradition — she attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison instead of a Southern Black college. After two years there though, she dropped out and moved to New York City. So Dr. Colbert, would you tell our listeners a bit about Hansberry’s life in New York?

SOYICA: So Hansberry moves to New York in 1950. She's only 20 years old, and she moves there and begins to work for a periodical called Freedom, which was owned by Paul Robeson, who at the time was a well-known musician and actor, and who had also been blacklisted because of his affiliation with the Communist Party. And so by this point, Paul Robeson’s passport had been revoked, and so he was unable to travel and earn money as a musician. And so Hansberry comes to New York in the midst of the Cold War, and she begins to work with leftist organizations, including Paul Robeson’s Freedom, and begins her education as an activist. And so she not only works at Freedom she also takes classes with at the new school and with W.E.B.Dubois — he calls her one of his favorite students — and she also begins to organize with the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, which is the leftist black organization run by women that Hansberry learns about when she's reporting on them for Freedom and becomes friends and a mentee of Alice Childress, who's also a black leftist and who was blacklisted for a time as well.

AMY: And it’s around this time, in New York, when Hansberry meets the producer and songwriter Robert Nemiroff, her future husband. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about their relationship and what role he may have played in shaping her artistic life?

SOYICA: So I describe Nemiroff as using a phrase in Toni Morrison's Beloved, that he was “a friend of her mind.” So Hansberry meets Robert Nemiroff, (or as she calls him, Bobby), on a picket line. I mean, I think the strongest articulation of their relationship was their shared political beliefs. They started off as friends and comrades and then started a romantic relationship. And once they got married, both of them worked doing odd jobs, but eventually he was able to sell a song, “Cindy, Oh Cindy”, that gave Hansberry the time she needed to work completely on her artistic work. And that's when she started writing A Raisin in the Sun. And so she stopped writing for periodicals that she had been doing since she moved to New York, and she started working on A Raisin in the Sun. And even though Hansberry and Bobby didn't have a traditional relationship (because by this time, in 1957, they're already living separate lives somewhat) when she starts working on A Raisin in the Sun.) They always remain partners in terms of their work and their artistic work. And so Nemiroff helps Hansberry get Raisin produced on Broadway; it's through some of their shared friendships they meet the producers that produce the play. And then in 1964, well, after their romantic relationship was over, you see in the archive, that Nemiroff is giving her feedback on her final play that's produced during her life. And so even though their romantic relationship was never traditional, and certainly they stopped living together as husband and wife well before A Raisin in the Sun, they continue to be partners in terms of their political and artistic work throughout her life. 

AMY: And we should have mentioned also probably that Bobby's white.

SOYICA: Yes, yes. So it's untraditional in all senses of the word. It’s an interracial relationship. Hansberry famously writes, in 1957, a letter to The Ladder (which is a lesbian periodical) that she is “a heterosexual, married lesbian.” And so again, before Raisin, before she becomes famous, both of them are aware of her same-sex desire and how that complicates their relationship.

KIM: In your book, you posit that life and work for Hansberry were a set of “practices” that were, above all, dedicated to a “radical vision” of transformation. And I was so inspired by this—this act of living and working toward this radical vision—and the idea that the process was more important than the destination. Her friend Nina Simone wrote in her memoir that when she and Hansberry got together, “It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution — real girls’ talk.” Can you tell our listeners more about Hansberry’s “radical vision” and how it fits into Black Radicalism? What and who were some of the influences that shaped her thinking? 

SOYICA: So Black Radicalism accounts for the fundamental imprint that slavery left on American democracy and capitalism. So one way of thinking about this is we think about capitalism as an economic system. We often think of it as having free markets that are uninformed by political or personal investments. But if you account for the history of slavery, you see how that's not the case in the United States. And so when we think about will and transformation, um, you know, these key American ideals of the individual, we have to think about them and the relationship to capitalism as it plays out in the US. And so that's what Hansberry was thinking about. She was thinking about the history of slavery and how it intertwined with American democracy and our economic systems. And so although Hansberry believed that individuals, through their affirmative actions, could transform the world, she also understood that transformation as being part of networks. And she saw her individual work as part of a longer network of activity that she called the Movement that traced back to slave insurrections and into the present. And so you see Hansberry both being influenced by figures like W. E.B. Dubois, who is one of the key figures in thinking about Black Radicalism, but then also existentialist like Simone de Beauvoir, that Hansberry writes about as one of the key figures in transforming her work, particularly when Hansberry reads The Second Sex and talks about how it helps her to think about gender in new ways. And so, in part, Hansberry is influenced by Black Radicals like Dubois, but then she's also influenced by the existentialists that are coming to the forefront in the mid 20th century.

AMY: So, let’s circle back now to A Raisin in the Sun. Can you give us a little more context on what was going on in Hansberry’s life leading up to the play being produced and how it ended up on Broadway?

SOYICA: So Hansberry had stopped working for periodicals, and, as I said before, she was working a bunch of odd jobs when she first came to New York and as a writer, but by the time she began working on A Raisin in the Sun in earnest, she had carved out enough resources (thanks to Nemeroff’s hit song) to just focus on her writing. And so she writes this play, and Bobby and Lorraine had a shared friend named Philip Rose (whom Hansberry actually met at a communist camp called Camp Unity that she had attended earlier in the 50s.) And so they invite him over for spaghetti dinner, they read the play, Philip Rose loves it and says, “We're going to put it on Broadway.” And you can imagine the naivete and the vigor of their youth, because they're all young in their 20s. No one has ever produced a play before. Hansberry has not, you know, published any or produced any of her work as a playwright before, but they decided they're going to put it on Broadway. And it's their pure chutzpah and determination that gets it there. She's the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway. And it's one of these tales where at so many different turns, things could have gone a different direction, but the brunt of the play shines through. And so it has brilliant previews in New Haven and Chicago, and it's because of those reviews that, ultimately, it's produced at a Broadway house.

AMY: The show opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on March 11, 1959, and it was immediately a huge success. Like you said, it was the first play produced on Broadway by an African-American woman, and Hansberry was the first Black playwright (and at age 29, the youngest American) to win a New York Drama Critics’ Circle award. The film version of A Raisin in the Sun was completed in 1961, starring Sidney Poitier, and received an award at the Cannes Film Festival. So I’m just going to read a little overview of the plot from your book, Dr. Colbert, for anyone who hasn’t seen it or who needs a refresher: A Raisin in the Sun depicts three generations of the Younger family buckling under the pressure of their deferred dreaming. The family reflects a long history of Black people's foreclosed desires and denied opportunities. Similar to many Black families in America, the Youngers had become accustomed to waiting for change to come. The death of the family's patriarch, Big Walter, however, results in an insurance payment to his widow Lena Younger (also known as Mama) that has the potential to change each member of the family's life. Lena’s son, Walter Lee, dreams of becoming an entrepreneur by opening a liquor store. His sister Beneatha aspires to attend medical school. Ruth, Walter Lee's wife, shares with Lena the vision of buying a home so that the family can escape the cramped quarters of their small apartment. Each dream is personal, seemingly individual, and in line with what we have come to call the “good life” in American society. Higher education, entrepreneurship and homeownership: all stepping stones on the family's ascension to the middle class. In addition, the set, style, and narrative of the play domesticates the Younger’s dreams and deemphasizes the way their yearning participates in a global movement for Black freedom. 

Okay, so the play really hinges around this money that's coming to the family and this idea of potentially a new home in a new neighborhood. Why would Hansberry, as a Black woman and a Black radical, focus on this idea of the new house?

SOYICA: So it seems a little counterintuitive, because as I said earlier, Hansberry is very critical of capitalism and really sees it as a roadblock to Black people's freedom. But Hansberry also understood, as a woman living in the 1950s, that women were understood as having a place in the home. And if you think about space, women are often associated with the home, and men were more associated with public space. And this is part of the reason why you see many of the leaders that we think of as leaders in the Civil Rights movement, as being men. And of course, we know that's not true today, but in terms of gender in the 1950s, women were more associated with the home. And so one of the things that A Raisin in the Sun asks us to consider is: What does it mean to desegregate private space? So not just the public spaces of a Woolworth or a bus stop, or a bus, but what does it mean to desegregate private spaces as a whole — women's spaces? And so setting the play in that context allows us to not only consider desegregation as a central part of the Civil Rights Movement, but also its specific impact on women.

AMY: Okay, so now’s the time — I call it “Lost Ladies of Lit Theater,” everyone, and I want our listeners to be able to hear a little bit of the play read aloud. So Soyica and I are going to do the honors. Would you like to sort of set up this passage that we’re about to read?

SOYICA: Yes. So in the play, one of the main characters is the youngest sister of the protagonist — her name is Beneatha Younger — and she has two suitors in the play. One is African American, and one is an African exchange student. And so in the play, all of the family’s striving emerges around this insurance payment that they're going to use to fulfill their dreams. But unfortunately, Beneatha’s older brother loses a good sum of the money and so the family has to decide what they will do now that they don't have all the money they thought they would have. And so this scene is a conversation between Beneatha and her African suitor about what they will do now, now that Walter Lee has lost a good portion of the insurance. 

AMY: And we should add that Beneatha’s dreams are to go to medical school and become a doctor. She was hoping that part of the money would be able to be put towards that.

SOYICA: Yes. So I’m going to play Asagai, and Amy has generously agreed to play Beneatha.

AMY: Alright, we’ll do our best here.

SOYICA: We’ll see. Okay, um, so Act One, Scene One.

BENEATHA: He gave away the money, Asagai ...

ASAGAI: Who gave away what money?

BENEATHA: The insurance money. My brother gave it away.

ASAGAI: Gave it away?

BENEATHA: He made an investment! With a man even Travis wouldn’t have trusted with his most worn-out marbles.

ASAGAI: And it’s gone?

BENEATHA: Gone.

ASAGAI: I’m very sorry ... And you, now?

BENEATHA: Me? ... Me? ... Me, I’m nothing … Me. When I was very small ... we used to take our sleds out in the wintertime and the only hills we had were the ice-covered stone steps of some houses down the street. And we used to fill them in with snow and make them smooth and slide down them all day … and it was very dangerous, you know  … far too steep … and sure enough one day a kid named Rufus came down too fast and hit the sidewalk and we saw his face just split open right there in front of us … And I remember standing there looking at his bloody open face thinking that was the end of Rufus. But the ambulance came and they took him to the hospital and they fixed the broken bones and they sewed it all up … and the next time I saw Rufus he just had a little line down the middle of his face … I never got over that …

ASAGAI: What?

BENEATHA: That that was what one person could do for another, fix him up — sew up the problem, make him all right again. That was the most marvelous thing in the world … I wanted to do that. I always thought it was the one concrete thing in the world that a human being could do. Fix up the sick, you know — and make them whole again. This was truly being God.

ASAGAI: You wanted to be God?

BENEATHA: No — I wanted to cure. It used to be so important to me. I wanted to cure. It used to matter. I used to care. I mean about people and how their bodies hurt …

ASAGAI: And you’ve stopped caring?

BENEATHA: Yes — I think so.

ASAGAI: Why?

BENEATHA: Because it doesn’t seem deep enough, close enough to what ails mankind! It was a child’s way of seeing things — or an idealist’s.

ASAGAI: Children see things very well sometimes — and idealists even better.

BENEATHA: I know that’s what you think. Because you are still where I left off. You with all your talk and dreams about Africa! You still think you can patch up the world. Cure the Great Sore of Colonialism with the Penicillin of Independence — !

ASAGAI: Yes!

BENEATHA: Independence and then what? What about all the crooks and thieves and just plain idiots who will come into power and steal and plunder the same as before — only now they will be black and do it in the name of the new Independence — WHAT ABOUT THEM?!

ASAGAI: That will be the problem for another time. First we must get there.

BENEATHA: And where does it end?

ASAGAI: End? Who even spoke of an end? To life? To living?

BENEATHA: An end to misery! To stupidity! Don’t you see there isn’t any real progress, Asagai, there is only one large circle that we march in, around and around, each of us with our own little picture in front of us — our own little mirage that we think is the future.

ASAGAI: That is the mistake.

BENEATHA: What?

ASAGAI: What you just said about the circle. It isn’t a circle — it is simply a long line — as in geometry, you know, one that reaches into infinity. And because we cannot see the end — we also cannot see how it changes. And it is very odd but those who see the changes — who dream, who will not give up — are called idealists … and those who see only the circle we call them the “realists!”

BENEATHA: Asagai, while I was sleeping in that bed in there, people went out and took the future right out of my hands! And nobody asked me, nobody consulted me — they just went out and changed my life!

ASAGAI: Was it your money?

BENEATHA: What?

ASAGAI: Was it your money he gave away?

BENEATHA: It belonged to all of us.

ASAGAI: But did you earn it? Would you have had it at all if your father had not died?

BENEATHA: No.

ASAGAI: Then isn’t there something wrong in a house — in a world — where all dreams, good or bad, must depend on the death of a man? I never thought to see you like this, Alaiyo. You! Your brother made a mistake and you are grateful to him so that now you can give up on the ailing human race on account of it! You talk about what good is struggle, what good is anything! Where are we all going and why are we bothering!

BENEATHA: AND YOU CANNOT ANSWER IT!

ASAGAI: I LIVE THE ANSWER! In my village at home it is the exceptional man who can even read a newspaper … or who ever sees a book at all. I will go home and much of what I will have to say will seem strange to the people of my village. But I will teach and work and things will happen, slowly and swiftly. At times it will seem that nothing changes at all … and then again the sudden dramatic events which make history lieap into the future. And then quiet again. Retrogression even. Guns, murder, revolution. And I even will have moments when I wonder if the quiet was not better than all that death and hatred. But I will look about my village at the illiteracy and disease and ignorance and I will not wonder long. And perhaps … perhaps I will be a great man … I mean perhaps I will hold on to the substance of truth and find my way always with the right course … and perhaps for it I will be butchered in my bed some night by the servants of the empire …

BENEATHA: The martyr!

ASAGAI: … or perhaps I shall live to be a very old man, respected and esteemed in my new nation … And perhaps I shall hold office and this is what I’m trying to tell you, Alaiyo: Perhaps the things I believe now for my country will be wrong and outmoded, and I will not understand and do terrible things to have things my way or merely to keep my power. Don’t you see that there will be young men and women — not British soldiers then, but my own black countrymen — to step out of the shadows some evening and slit my then useless throat? Don’t you see they have always been there … that they always will be. And that such a thing as my own death will be an advance? They who might kill me even … actually replenish all that I was.

BENEATHA: Oh, Asagai! I know all that.

ASAGAI: Good! Then stop moaning and groaning and tell me what you plan to do. 

AMY: And… scene!

KIM: I think I was holding my breath! I’m glad you did that, Amy, and not me. You were incredible. You both did such a beautiful job. And let’s tell our listeners, there’s a reason that you read that conversation, specifically, because it actually, it is the crux of the play, right?

SOYICA: Yes, so Hansberry, in an interview, says that Asaga is the thesis of the play. It draws attention, also, that moment, to the relationship between what's happening in Chicago and how it relates to independence movements happening throughout the world, throughout Africa, which Hansberry was aware of because of her work for freedom and her covering of independence movements in Africa in the 1950s. And you also hear two other important points in that portion. You hear Hansberry’s ideas around how individuals could transform things. So she's really interested in depicting doctors and engineers in her work, because she sees them as fixing things. And she's interested in how individuals have the capacity to transform a human condition. And she's also interested in thinking about how individual action helps to restructure society, and so you hear that Asagai’s talking about, you know, he may be useful to his country for a while, and then he may no longer be useful, and that's all a part of the grander scheme of things.

KIM: And in Radical Vision, you explain how Hansberry used her art to showcase encounters (they could be political, sexual, personal, and historical) with witnesses. And theater audiences were, of course, a built-in witness to the encounters that Hansberry created with her art. Although her play was a massive success, were there some disconnects, then, between Hansberry’s intentions and the things the audience actually took away from it? 

SOYICA: Absolutely. So Hansberry was called an assimilationist. People thought of her as a one-hit wonder. In an interview with Mike Wallace, he calls her “a housewife that just wrote a play.” So there are lots of misconceptions about Hansberry and her work. Often people associated Hansberry with her middle class upbringing, and so wondered about her depicting a working class family and the authenticity of that vision, as well. And I think that part of what is missed is how Hansberry saw the relationship between Black people in the US across class lines, and Black people throughout the world. Again, it's a part of a larger freedom movement, because most people were just focusing on this individual family and this “kitchen sink drama” as depicting this one family rather than this family as emblematic of a larger set of struggles that Hansberry was interested in exploring.

AMY: And that’s why Asagai is important. In some ways, you’re like, “Well, does he really factor into the plot in terms of what’s actually happening to the family?” Not necessarily, but it’s that speech that sort of connects to her beliefs.

SOYICA: Right, her beliefs about the world, and I think that, you know, people trying to understand Hansberry… if you look at A Raisin in the Sun without considering the character of Asagai, you’ve missed a big part of what she was trying to communicate.

AMY: And also, I want to tell our listeners, if you want to just spend 30 minutes of your life that will blow your mind, you need to go find the YouTube recording of the interview between Hansberry and Mike Wallace, because this girl schools him. She was only what, like, 24? How old was she, during that interview? 

SOYICA: Oh, this was 1959. So she was 29. 

AMY: Oh, okay. So it's still, I mean ... first of all, she's handling it with such eloquence and poise. But you can sense that she's thinking like, “Oh, my God, this guy is such a clown.” And she just very calmly and rationally just tells him to take a seat.

KIM: Yeah, she's way up here, and he's down there, you know, trying to talk to her. But her ideas are so beyond, it seems like what he can even comprehend or feels like he can explain to his audience.

SOYICA: It's brilliant. I mean, the thing that that interview also shows us is that there was no point of reference for Lorraine Hansberry in 1959. And so he's trying to make sense of her given the terms that he has at the time, but she doesn't fit into those boxes. And so even as she tries to redirect him to think about her in a different way, he just doesn't have the capacity to do so because there's no point of reference from what she can draw to understand her.

AMY: Also, let’s talk about the ending of the play, and the debates the audiences had about it. Because I know I had my own conflicted feelings as I was reading it.

SOYICA: So whenever I teach A Raisin in the Sun, I take a poll of my students and I ask them whether or not the Younger family should move at the end of the play; the play hinges, again, on them buying this house and then deciding, ultimately, whether or not they're moving into the house in a segregated neighborhood. And we know from history and from Hansberry’s own personal history that if they move, they're going to face violence in the neighborhood. It's not going to be a happy, you know, neat, ending to a melodrama. And so the question is whether or not they should move or whether or not they should stay. And if they stay, then they could also take a bribe from the community, because they try to repurchase the home to prevent the Youngers from desegregating the community. And so, in the book, I talk about how the decision is not whether or not the Youngers should move. The decision is really understanding that Hansberry thought each affirmative act was a building block in the movement for Black freedom. And so the question is not about whether or not the Youngers should move, but whether or not they should assert themselves in history in this way, even if it means they're going to face violence once they move to Clybourne Park. And so their choice to move is really about them changing the course of history, one decision at a time.

AMY: And that's what makes Walter’s... I feel like he has two speeches there towards the end: one that's sort of in favor of staying and sort of sticking it to this new community. And then the other one where he changes his mind. And he ultimately has a change of heart and decides they need to go. Both of those are so powerful, and both of those, there's truth to it, you know? That's what made it difficult. But then when you see the second speech, you're like, “That is what you have to ... you have to do it, you have to do it.”

KIM: It’s so powerful, even though it’s not a “happy ending,” per se. And people might have taken it, if they just, you know, saw the ending and thought, “Oh, that’s a happy ending because it can sort of complete the idea.” You realize that they’re going to be facing potential violence and lots of discrimination and everything going forward.

AMY: Didn’t Hansberry have an alternate ending, where it shows that?

SOYICA: She did. So in the alternate ending of the play, they move into the neighborhood and they're barricaded and ... the Younger family’s barricaded in their new home, protecting themselves with a gun. That imagery alludes to her own experience because one of the things that Hansberry learned when her parents desegregated a neighborhood as a child is while her father was off in Washington DC fighting for freedom in the courts, her mother was at home protecting the family with a pistol from the mobs jeering at them and so forth. And so Hansberry saw an example both of Civil Rights activism in the courts as a child, but she also saw the possibility of self-defense. And so she replicates that scene with her mother in one of the versions of the play (ending to the play) and ultimately that's not the version that gets produced on Broadway, but it is something that Hansberry remembers.

KIM: And in Radical Vision, you explore this divergence between Hansberry’s private life and her public life. She had love affairs with women—her friendship circle included the lesbian author of Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh, whom we did an episode on last year—and Hansberry even wrote letters to her husband about one day finding her dream woman. So can you talk a bit about her unconventional private life and how it squared with her public life, particularly after she became so well known? (She was profiled in Vogue and the New York Times)

SOYICA: So no one knew when Hansberry was alive, outside of her intimate circle, that she was a lesbian. So as I mentioned before, she had an unconventional marriage. She wrote her letters to The Ladder, which she signed with her initials so that again, the public didn't have a record that Hansberry is one who wrote them. But her inner circle, including Nemiroff, was aware of her same-sex desire even prior to them getting married. And so after A Raisin in the Sun is produced on Broadway, Hansberry purchases an apartment and her and Nemiroff begin to live separate lives and another apartment in the village and in that building lives one of her long term on-again, off-again lovers, Dorothy Secules, and also in that building lives Phil Rose, who is the producer of A Raisin in the Sun, so it's, you know, a very small circle people. But Hansberry had, what we would call today queer circles a friends (lesbian women, gay men — James Baldwin is one of her closest friends), but Hansberry also, for the most part, most of her circle of friends were white women. And so Hansberry often struggled with finding her place in the world, because she had her Civil Rights activist friends, who were predominantly black, she had her queer friends, who were predominantly white. And she often found herself out of place amongst all the groups in which she interacted. And so you see Hansberry struggling with that in some of her private writing, but none of that comes to the fore in any of her public self. It does emerge some in some of the characters she depicts in some of her writing, so there's a queer character in her play, LeBlanc, which is produced after her death, there's a queer character and The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, which is produced, um, you know, right at the end of her life. Her identity as a queer woman, as a lesbian, isn't discovered until after her death when people begin to realize that the letters to The Ladder were written by Lorraine Hansberry, and her archive becomes public where you have a lot of queer writing that was never published.

KIM: So I’d like to talk a little bit more about the idea of encounters that we discussed earlier. You write that, “Encounter serves as a moment of friction that may result in greater clarity for all, those involved in the encounter, and those that bear witness to it” and that it can “disrupt history.” And it made me think of the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Derek Chauvin trial. It became, on some level, a collective, global experience of witnessing. Do you see these viral “encounters” between police and Black citizens as an extension of Hansberry’s “radical vision?” 

SOYICA: Absolutely. So several commenters who have been reflecting on George Floyd's death and then the trial have noted that the young teenage girl, Darnella Frazier, who captured the video of George Floyd's death, who bore witness to his death, is one of the reasons that we have the conviction. And so the idea of Black people bearing witness to America’s atrocities emerges in our contemporary moment via the recording of George Floyd's death, but also has a longer historical trajectory. If you think about Mamie Till-Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, who famously allowed Jet magazine to run an image of her son's mutilated corpse on its cover in 1955, because she said she wanted the nation to see what was done to her son. And so you know, that idea of witnessing atrocities is very much a part of the Black Radical tradition, and certainly, I think, what Hansberry is getting at. But I also think there's another piece of this story in terms of witnessing, because I think Hansberry was also interested in the idea of Black people being able to see one another, to be able to bear witness to one's point of view. And so there's this really, I think, important moment in Hansberry’s life where she's in a meeting with Robert Kennedy, who is at the time, the Attorney General, and he has gathered her and James Baldwin, Lena Horne, (a bunch of famous Black people at the time) to discuss the quote-unquote, “Civil Rights issue.” And there's a lesser known figure in the room named Jerome Smith, who's an activist. And so at one point, Bobby Kennedy asked Hansberry a question, and she directs him that he should be talking to the activists on the ground, he should be talking to Jerome Smith, rather than asking, you know, these famous Black people for what they should do about the Civil Rights issue. And so I also see that as a moment of witnessing, because it's a moment where Hansberry is able to recognize the point of view of someone else in the room and give them space to speak for their experience rather than her taking up all the space in the world. 

KIM: Yeah, it’s like the idea of letting someone use your platform today.

SOYICA: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

KIM: And I’m curious, maybe, how some contemporary movies Get Out and Us for example… Sorry to Bother You..  how you might see them fitting into the radical vision that Lorraine Hansberry espoused during her time.

SOYICA: So I love the idea of thinking about Get Out and Sorry to Bother You as depictions of radical vision, because what they do in part is to use genre to help to translate the experience of Black people, which in some ways can seem, you know, difficult to understand, and can be hard to translate. And so they use genre to get at what some sometimes can be understood to be the terror of Black life. And Hansberry, she was always interested in trying to connect across difference and articulate a vision for Black people of what is possible. And so she was both very much invested in creating coalitions with people who are different from herself, but then also with connecting with Black people. And so I think that, you know, her decision around using realism, as I say, in the book was both about depicting what is but also what is possible. And that's part of the reason why she liked to use witness, both in the sense of bearing witness, but then also a sense of being able to connect with people.

AMY: There was something in your book about this idea of encounter is not meant to necessarily bring about a resolution. It’s just supposed to bring some clarity and start the ball rolling, which is kind of what Asagai was talking about, too. It’s not about fixing it all instantly. It’s going to take a really long time. And these encounters that you have are just one step along the way.

KIM: They’re building upon each other.

SOYICA: Exactly. Exactly. It’s that friction and realizing that we disagree and trying to understand the other person’s perspective that Hansberry was trying to get at.

KIM: That brings up I wanted to ask about LeBlanc too, I saw that it's the first time in 15 years in the UK, they're doing a production of that and also A Raisin in the Sun. They haven't had any Lorraine Hansberry’s work in 15 years. And I saw in the article that said that, that Nemiroff had said that LeBlanc was Lorraine Hansberry’s greatest work. So I wanted to hear what you had to say about LeBlanc and how it fits into her work. And I have not read that, so I'm interested to hear about it.

SOYICA: The National Theater did a production of LeBlanc — it’s a really powerful production. As I said before, LeBlanc isn’t produced in the U.S. until after Hansberry dies. It's about an independence movement in a fictional African country. And it's a brilliant play that features around the story of three brothers, and in some ways has allusions to Shakespeare's Hamlet. But the play is really struggling with this central figure, who similar to Hamlet, who comes home after his father's death, and deals with a ghost that his father leaves. But in this case, it's the ghost of the revolution rather than the ghost of the monarchy. And so his son has to deal with, or reconcile, the independence movement that's happening in his home country, even though he's moved on and become an expat living in Europe at the time.

KIM: Do you agree with Nemiroff about it being her greatest work?

SOYICA: I  don't know. It definitely has a full version of her radicalism expressed explicitly in the play. But I think that there's parts of A Raisin In the Sun that I really love, because it has a young woman character that's such a strong and well-rounded figure, whereas LeBlanc focuses on three male characters, which are also you know, fascinating, but I love the fact that Hansberry gives us Beneatha, a young black woman in 1959, who doesn't want to make the world through marriage. She says, “I want to make myself,” and I think that is a really powerful statement, particularly for the time period. So I don't know if I could give a ranking of my Hansberry plays. I think they all have their amazing qualities. But I do think that there's something special to me about the character of Beneatha in Raisin.

AMY: It does seem, though, that the time is ripe now for more of her plays to start getting more exposure and being produced in theaters again.

SOYICA: I hope so! You know, before the pandemic there was in the US, there was a plan to have a cycle of her plays, so Sign, LeBlanc and Raisin, all we're planning on being produced in 2020. And of course, that didn't happen. And so I'm hopeful that that will happen, hopefully in the near future, because I do think the timing is right.

AMY: Okay, so Hansberry died young, at the age of 34, from cancer. It was a terrible loss for us all because you really can’t help but think about how wonderfully she might have been able to still speak to us and guide us, especially today). So Dr. Colbert, how can studying her work and learning from her practice continue her legacy and further her radical vision?

SOYICA: So the biggest takeaway and gift I had from writing this book and learning about Hansberry was a lesson in how to live a life of integrity as a daily practice. And so Hansberry really saw quotidian, day-to-day choices and activities as part of the building blocks of transformations of society. And so you hear that Asagai speech, of him saying these big changes that happen by way of these small integral steps that we take. The other thing that I'll say is that the Hansberry we find in the archive adds to what we know and offers us a model for how to use and access knowledge in an ethical way. And so, you know, Hansberry left for us breadcrumbs of future possibilities, and they're all located in her archive. And so, I'm grateful to Robert Nemeroff, who, even though he was divorced from his wife at the time, she named him as executor of her estate — again, you know, a friend of her mind — and he kept her papers meticulously. And now the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust has made them available to the public via the Schomburg Public Library. And so again, it's a great gift that we all have to be able to read her published and unpublished work and get a fuller sense of her radical vision in the archives.

KIM: Dr. Colbert, we want to thank you so much for joining us for this fantastic discussion today. 

SOYICA: Thank you so much for having me! And thank you so much for the care you took with my book. I deeply appreciate it.

AMY: So that’s all for today’s episode. If you like what you heard, consider giving us a rating and review where you listen to this podcast. It’s the single most important thing you can do to help us grow our audience and help other book-minded people find us. 

KIM: Also, I just wanted to share with you that I’m teaching a one-day online workshop through the UCLA Extension program, it’s on November 6th. The workshop is called Adapting Literature, Myths, and Fairy Tales for New YA Audiences. I’ve taught it a few times and it’s a lot of fun. It’s about three hours, and you can take it from anywhere. We’ll put a registration link in the show notes for you. 

AMY: And don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast so you don’t miss a single episode, guys, and we will see you next week! Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. “Lost Ladies of Lit” is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.