Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was a playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway.

Her best known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of Black Americans living under racial segregation in Chicago. The title of the play was taken from the poem “Harlem” by Langston Hughes: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”

At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award — making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so.

Hansberry’s family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant and eventually provoking the 1940 Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee. – Wikipedia