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

by Imani Perry

I think then that Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent. That they must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps, and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities. The acceptance of our present condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children.

“The cost, in emotional turmoil, time, and money, which led to my father’s early death as a permanently mad exile in a foreign country when he saw that after such sacrificial efforts the Negroes of Chicago were as ghetto-locked and segregated as ever, does not seem to figure in their calculations.”34 The “right way” hadn’t yielded the necessary change. And so, she said, “we must now lie down in the streets, tie up traffic, do whatever we can—take to the hills with guns if necessary—and fight back. False people remark these days on our ‘bitterness.’ Why, of course, we are bitter.”35

The radical could understand that the basic organization of American society had to be transformed in order for racial justice to ever become a possibility.