The 1950s: When Lorraine Hansberry Came To New York
(This talk was delivered at a symposium commemorating Loraine Hansberry and her play, “Raisin in the Sun”, University of California at Berkeley, February 19, 1998.)
I saw the first performance of Raisin in the Sun at the Schubert Theater on January 21, 1959 in New Haven, Connecticut, my home at the time. The next morning’s papers echoed what everyone in the audience knew. The play was a hit, a gem. More than that, it was the stuff of history -- not just theater history, but social history.
A couple of days later, on the eve of Raisin ‘s departure from New Haven on its journey toward Broadway, Lorraine and a few other friends spent the evening in our home sharing with us the wonder and the joy. The other friends from the cast included two understudies for whom Raisin was the beginning of careers in dramatic arts, Douglas Turner Ward, who became founder of the National Negro Theater Ensemble, and Lonnie Elder, who would write the screen play Sounder. The comradeship that brought Lorraine, her husband Robby Nemiroff, Doug and Lonnie together with our family that evening had formed in the early 1950s in New York. We were in an activist socialist youth organization, the Labor Youth League (LYL). Lorraine was co-editor of our magazine,New Challenge, while she worked on Paul Robeson’s paper, Freedom; Doug was chair of the Harlem LYL, and I, several years older than the others, was National Chairperson.
I have been asked to tell you a little about those times, the 1950s. To begin with, an activist, radical, strongly interracial and anti-racist youth movement was an anomaly in those days. Youth of the 1950’s were dubbed “the silent generation.” On the surface, at least, this was a decade of conformity.
The years 1950 to 1954 were high tide for McCarthyism, “scoundrel time” in playwright Lillian Hellman’s designation. The Korean War brought an eruption of violence and racism, the ever imminent threat of an encore of atomic horror unleashed against an Asian population, “the gooks” as Koreans were commonly called in the military and often in the media. Domestic repression of dissent cast a very wide net, firings and blacklists, subpoenas and arrests, countless FBI harassments, a parade of paid informers and fear-driven betrayals. In an atmosphere where segregation and persecution on a racial basis were part of the national fabric and not yet disturbing to the majority of Americans, a particular venality was directed at Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois when they challenged Cold War hysteria. Perhaps the starkest symbol of where America was being dragged was the assault on Paul Robeson’s concert in Peekskill, New York. Thousands leaving the scene after the concert were showered with rocks by organized vigilantes and scores ended up in hospitals seriously wounded.
These were the circumstances in which 20 year-old Lorraine went to work with Lou Burnham on Robeson’s paper, appeared for Robeson at an international conference when his passport was lifted, lost her own passport in reprisal, and assisted W.E.B. Du Bois when the US Attorney moved against him.
The Labor Youth League was one of some 200 organizations listed as “subversive” by the US Attorney General. We were prosecuted under the McCarran Internal Security Act and some of us, including Doug Ward and myself, testified for weeks before a so-called “Subversive Activities Control Board.” There the prosecuting attorney was the same Kirk Madrix who argued the government’s case against Du Bois. Under the McCarran Act, we were ordered to turn over, once legal proceedings were exhausted, our membership lists or suffer an unimaginable penalty: a $5,000 fine and 5 years in jail for each day of refusal to comply! The legal process went on for years and finally, after McCarthyism had receded, the Supreme Court threw out the McCarran Act as well as the anti-communist Smith Act, under which hundreds of families had been hounded and scores of men and women were incarcerated in federal penitentiaries.
In these few minutes, I can’t tell you much about who we were and what we were doing in those times, what Lorraine and all of us shared, and what Lorraine went on to do that elevated us and was uniquely fulfilling for her once young friends of the early 50s. The very adversity of those times, the will to pit our hopes and ideals against the prevailing tides, made for close bonding and a lot of learning from each other. It’s fair to say that the strongest bonds grew in the struggle to understand racism and to confront it in action and in thought: whether in the fight against “legal” lynchings of Willie McGee and Emmet Till or in picketing a Jim Crow restaurant in Detroit; whether in examining the nature of an oppressive society or in gaining awareness of what might lie hidden in our own relationships. Young people from many parts of the country shared insights and commitment, none with greater effect than a remarkable group of friends who, like Lorraine, grew up on Chicago’s South Side. Within a supposedly “silent generation”, there were more than a few voices of the young and gifted, black, brown and white. For all of these, Lorraine went on to become the “sighted eyes and feeling heart” that reached from one generation to the next in the turbulent 60s. In fact, her short life carried messages, profound and beautiful, across all generations.
I was reminded of Lorraine recently when I saw a TV documentary series on the Irish in America. The story was thoroughly Irish, but if you put it alongside a thoroughly Chicano history, or an African-American or Jewish immigrant story, the very differences would make common chords resonate. I remember Lorraine talking about her sense of kinship with Sean O’Casey, the great Irish playwright, and in her writings she often linked Raisin in the Sun with O’Casey’s Juno and the Peacock. Lorraine was speaking of art, when she said:
“.... in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality emerges from truthful identity of what is.”
If only Lorraine’s message could penetrate today’s still feeble “dialogue on race”!
Back in the 1950s, and earlier than that, the notion of “life with a purpose” became a personal mantra within the progressive youth movement. Lorraine Hansberry captured that spirit in her life and in the creative beauty of her prose. Her message was and is:
“....I believe that we can impose beauty on our future....”
“....man might just do what the apes never will -- impose the reason for life on life.”
* * * * * *
TO BE YOUNG , GIFTED AND BLACK Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words,
adapted by Robert Nemiroff, Prentice-Hall (1969):
“.... in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific.
Universality emerges from truthful identity of what is.” p. 114
“....I believe that we can impose beauty on our future.... p. 115
“....man might just do what the apes never will -- impose the reason for life on life.” p. 100