Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry

by Imani Perry

Lorraine asserted that attributing cultural deficiency to the Mau Mau and Africans generally was a red herring intended to distract from the primary issue, which was “stark, brutal colonialism in one of its most ruthless expressions.”

In truth, Lorraine’s politics were increasingly on the margins of the Black political mainstream. The major civil rights organizations had largely separated themselves from the radical left

symbolically and literally evidenced by Du Bois’s excommunication from the NAACP, an organization he cofounded and for which he was once a key figure.

The way they walked, all of them, the walk of men without places to go. I do not only mean that they ambled slowly and vaguely along, which they did, but it was more than that, Something about the picking up and setting down of feet that implied indecision; as though the feet could not always count on the sidewalk to be there.”

May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than sinew, sensitive than nerve.

Lorraine wrote, regarding The Second Sex, “The problem then is not that woman has strayed too far from ‘her place’ but that she has not yet attained it; that her emergence into liberty is, thus far, incomplete, primitive even. She has gained the teasing expectation of self-fulfillment without the realization of it, because she is herself yet chained to an ailing social ideology which seeks always to deny her autonomy and more—to delude her into the belief that that which in fact imprisons her the more is somehow her fulfillment,”

We never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when we got together. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution—real girls’ talk. Nina Simone about Lorraine2

William Faulkner has never in his life sat in on a discussion in a Negro home where there were all Negroes. It is physically impossible. He has never heard the nuances of hatred, of total contempt from his most devoted servant and his most beloved friend, although she means every word when she’s talking to him and will tell him profoundly intimate things. But he has never heard the truth of it. . . . The employer doesn’t go to the maid’s house.

They think that the alienation is equal on both sides. It isn’t. We’ve been washing everybody’s underwear for 300 years. We know when you’re not clean.

“The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”

Racism wasn’t, according to Lorraine, principally about sitting at lunch counters, it was about dispossession, exploitation, and raw power.

“Lest some be falsely persuaded by the tidings that the city’s ‘Negro leaders’ deplored the nationalist demonstrations at the United Nations, we should all be reminded that ‘Negro Leaders’ in such instances, are held to be any and all commentators who tell the white community exactly what the white community has made it clear it wishes to hear. It is an old and beloved if mutually dangerous custom in our land since plantation days.”6

“I feel that the old games of giving Ralph Bunche an award (or Lorraine Hansberry for that matter) for doing something that a Negro has not been allowed to do before is today intolerable. Leontyne Price is a very great artist—but the fact of her presence in the Metropolitan alters the condition of the masses of Negroes not in the least; neither will a Negro stuck here and there in the cabinet eventually.”

“The laws which enforce segregation do not presume the inferiority of a people; they assume an inherent equalness. It is the logic of the lawmakers that if a society does not erect artificial barriers between the people at every point of contact, the people might fraternize and give their attention to the genuine, shared problems of the community.”