Lorraine Hansberry Quotes
Men continue to misinterpret the second-rate status of women as implying a privileged status for themselves; heterosexuals think the same way about homosexuals; gentiles about Jews; whites about blacks; haves about have-nots.
Hansberry, Lorraine [as L.N.]. Letter. The Ladder, vol. 1, no. 11, Aug. 1957, p. 26.
He gave the examples of the fact that two of the leading terrorists of the 9-11 attack had gone to school in the United States, Khomeni—the anti-Western leader of the Iran revolution—lived in Paris for a long while, and other examples.
In the Nez Perce and most other Native American societies, there were Chiefs and occasionally, for special circumstances, War Chiefs, but few if any other officials, thus producing a very flat, egalitarian society. But the whites had many layers of bureaucrats and petty officials. Governors, The President, Members of Congress, State Legislators, Generals, Sheriffs, Indian Agents, tax collectors, and the like. On the Papago Indian reservation, there was great difficulty on a construction project as even the concept of a work foreman was an uncomfortable notion. No Papago wanted to be directed or ordered about by anyone else even on a work gang. And do no one wanted to assume a position of authority or be responsive to a fellow other than the Chief and the tribal elders.
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.
