Lorraine Hansberry Quotes
I think that the glorious thing about the human race is that it does change the world -- constantly. The world or 'life' may seem to more often overwhelm the human being's capacity for struggling against being overwhelmed which is remarkable and exhilarating.
Hansberry, Lorraine. To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. Adapted by Robert Nemiroff, Prentice-Hall, 1969, p. 240.
Selling alcohol and running saloons were against the law then in Kansas but there was no effort to enforce it anywhere in Kansas. Carrie Nation went into saloons and literally smashed the glasses, signs, mirrors and furniture with an ax. She smashed up the largest and most elegant saloon in Kansas and as jailed for it. She told the authorities this quotation and because of the publicity her jailing had caused, when she emerged an entire statewide and area movement had begun with Carrie as the leader.
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry 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 in the 1940 US Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.
