![]() ![]() She moved to New York City in 1950, the plaque says, wrote for “Paul Robeson’s Pan Africanist newspaper, Freedom,” married “producer” Robert Nemiroff, but “Later, she was involved with the nation’s first lesbian rights organization, The Daughters of Bilitis.” She inspired Nina Simone’s song “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” “The first African American woman to write a play performed on Broadway,” it begins, then talks about how some of the elements of “A Raisin in the Sun” are based on her parents’ life - how “their purchase of a home in a racially restricted Chicago neighborhood” led to a 1940 Supreme Court decision in their favor. ![]() Curious, I walked by the building, and discovered a plaque about her from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation: Shields’ biography of Lorraine Hansberry, the third such book I’ve read in as many years, the author mentions the five-story townhouse near Washington Square Park that Hansberry bought with the money she earned from the success of her play “ A Raisin in the Sun.” It was her home for the final five years of her life, until her death in 1965 at the age of 34. ![]()
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