Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry

Mollie Godfrey, Mollie Godfrey

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781496829658
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Biographies littéraires

Honorable Mention Recipient of the Modern Language Association Prize for Collaborative, Bibliographical, or Archival Scholarship Spanning from the debut of A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway in 1959 to her early death from cancer in January 1965, Lorraine Hansberry's short stint in the public eye changed the landscape of American theater. With A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry (1930–1965) became both the first African American woman to have a play produced on Broadway and the first to win the prestigious New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. Resonating deeply with the aims of the civil rights movement, Raisin also ushered in a new era of Black representation on the stage and screen, displacing the cartoonish stereotypes that were the remnants of blackface minstrelsy in favor of complex three-dimensional portrayals of Black characters and Black life. Hansberry's public discourse in the aftermath of Raisin 's success also disrupted mainstream critical tendencies to diminish the work of Black artists, helping pave the way for future work by Black playwrights. Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry is the first volume to collect all of her substantive interviews in one place, including many radio and television interviews that have never before appeared in print. The twenty-one pieces collected here—ranging from just before the Broadway premiere of A Raisin in the Sun to less than six months before Hansberry's death—offer an incredible window into Hansberry's aesthetic and political thought. In these conversations, Hansberry explores many of the questions most often put to Black writers of the mid-twentieth century—including everything from her thinking about the relationship between art and protest, universality and particularity, and realism and naturalism, to her sense of the relationship between Black intellectuals and the Black masses, integration and Black Nationalism, and African American and Pan-African liberation. Taken together, these interviews reveal the insight, intensity, and eloquence that made Hansberry such a transformative figure in American letters.

The Protest, Part I

Rev. William Hamilton / 1959

Broadcast on Look Up and Live, CBS-TV, May 3, 1959. Printed by permission of CBS News.¹

Announcer: The CBS television network presents Look Up and Live. Today, “Part I: The Protest,” an examination of what might be the religious nature of our contemporary culture. Our narrator, Reverend William Hamilton, professor of theology at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, Rochester, New York.

William Hamilton: Why should a religious program concern protest? Particularly since some of the most powerful protests of our time are against religion and against God? And even more, many of the critics of our conformist culture tell us that there is no capacity for protest or dissent or rebellion in our times today. Could we be examining something that does not exist? We think there is a kind of protest that’s important that we find in our culture today, and we want to examine its shape and direction. We want to see what it is protest against, and we want to see what it is protest for, on behalf of. We will hear it on its own terms as humbly and sympathetically as we can, and we will try, if possible, to speak a Christian word, perhaps, of interpretation and criticism as well. So, this morning, we will hear from four people, have four conversations with protestors or observers of this protest of our time. They will help us clarify our protest, I think. They will also, in their words, speak to us a word of power. For behind their words is real religious power, even if they do not use the word God at all. This power may come through, and we may find that their words are words of divine discontent that will hurt us and perhaps even transform us.

[Hamilton interviews Nat Hentoff, writer and critic of jazz.]

WH: Lorraine, we are talking about protest in our time today. What do you see, as both an artist and a person who lives in the midst of contemporary culture, what do you see as the shape of protest in our time?

Lorraine Hansberry: Well, it’s there in many diffuse ways. I think we are trying very hard, with some very negative ways even, to set up protest. I think some of the so-called “Beat” is a reflection of a kind of protest. I think some of us are a little more articulate in being specific about our protest.

WH: What are the forms of specific protest that you think are alive today?

LH: Well, with regard to something I feel very close to, the Negro question, for instance, there have been very clear and pronounced movements among Negroes to protest that which is actively against us in society, and other things. I think there is the beginning of some sort of feeling about the right to survive that is not as outspoken as it should be, but it’s getting there.

WH: The problem of weapons.

LH: Mmm.

WH: And yet, don’t you feel that in a sense there is more feeling about this than any coherent action in our time.

LH: Definitely, but presumably that feeling has to come first.

WH: Yes.

LH: And I think that the feeling is beginning to be there.

WH: And yet, surely, in the world in which you live, the capacity for protest is as often silent as articulate. It is not …

LH: That’s terribly true, and I don’t quite understand it, simply because there is so much to protest, and people who feel that the lack of protest or the absence of it is sophistication, I think, are kidding themselves and are doing no service to our problems.

WH: Then you would emphasize the distinction between simply an emotional identification with causes and actual action on behalf of causes.

LH: Yes, I’m afraid the real rewards in life and in literature come when you do something—when you participate actively—and I think we’re going to see that in America.

WH: How rare, though, political protest of any lively kind is.

LH: Well, we’ve been told that it wasn’t nice for eight years to have a political thought that had any element of protest and that this was very unwholesome for America, and I think we’re getting over it.

WH: And we’re still living on that fear, I suppose

LH: In many ways.

WH: Your play has been sometimes described as a play without protest, and some people have even tried to compliment you by saying that it’s not a Negro play at all but a play about people. Do you consider that a compliment?

LH: It’s a misstatement. It’s very much a play about people [laughs], but it’s also a play about Negroes in the first place. I’ve said very often that I think that you achieve the universal through the specific.

WH: Yes.

LH: And it certainly is a protest, perhaps not in the traditional form. That’s what they mean, I hope. But it is more than a protest in that I did try to suggest that there is something to do—that it is possible to take principled positions in our life.

WH: Yes, and it’s not really a question of fighting against something, but actually fighting on behalf of something.

LH: Always for. Always for. And that doesn’t mean that you diminish anything down to slogans; it means that you elevate it up to a very large statement.

WH: And that really the personal relationships at the end of the play between persons are the kind of secret of the …

LH: Yes and … it transcends interpersonal relationships. They begin to speak to all of us. I think. I hope. [laughs]

WH: Thank you very much, Lorraine.

[Hamilton interviews Gilbert Millstein of the New York Times and novelist John Clellon Holmes.]

WH: We’ve heard about protest today, a number of different kinds and in a number of different places. We’ve heard about protest embodied in jazz—not just a protest against our culture here, but a protest on behalf of human integrity and human dignity. We’ve heard about the kinds of protest possible in regard to the race issue, in regard to the problem of mass destruction weapons today. And we’ve heard about the kind of protest—very largely negative, we’re told—in the very unlikely place of the nightclub comedians. What is the relationship of the Christian faith to all this protest? Does it simply say yes to it and give it a word of encouragement? Well, it certainly must do this. But there is something more. John Holmes just mentioned that there is a spiritual yes that may be said. And Christians would certainly say this. Say yes to human dignity and human integrity and all that this means. But I think that the Christian faith in its depth even has a deeper word to say. A word deeper even than the affirmation of human love or human dignity or human integrity. And that is a word of protest first against God. Biblical man didn’t ever get to God easily. It was not easy for him to say yes to God. And you can trace that thin red line throughout both the Old and the New Testament, where man was not able to get to God until he argued with him. And whether we look at Jacob having to wrestle with the angel before he could be blessed, whether we look at the psalmist who was hounded by God into submission, whether we look at Job who had to argue impatiently and almost blasphemously with God before he could say yes to him, or whether we look at Christ in the Garden of [Gethsemane] turning away from the terror that was to follow, or even more horribly whether we listen to that imponderable word from the cross, “My God, why has Thou forsaken me,” we see that at the heart of the biblical message is the statement that one cannot be a man, one can know no human dignity until one dares to protest against God, for only by this vicious kind of arguing with God, can man ever know Him.

Note

1. Editor’s note: Self-prepared transcript. The original audio version of this interview is located in the Lorraine Hansberry Papers located in the Moving Image & Recorded Sound Division of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.

Unaired Interview with Lorraine Hansberry

Mike Wallace / 1959

Conducted May 8, 1959. Printed by permission of the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, on behalf of the Mike Wallace papers.¹

Mike Wallace: This is Mike Wallace with another television portrait in our gallery of interesting people. Our guest was an unknown, unpublished writer until earlier this year when her play A Raisin in the Sun came to Broadway. She is twenty-eight-year-old Lorraine Hansberry whose powerful story about the struggles of a poor Negro family in Chicago was voted by the New York Drama Critics as the best play of the year, better even than plays by Tennessee Williams, Archibald MacLeish, and Eugene O’Neill. We’ll talk with Miss Hansberry about playwriting and about people in just one minute.

■ ■ ■

MW: And now to our story. There is a story that one night, Lorraine Hansberry, a girl who had dabbled in writing, made a brash announcement to her husband. She was going to sit down and write an honest and accurate drama about Negroes. Miss Hansberry exceeded her own expectations, perhaps, because she wrote A Raisin in the Sun, the Broadway hit which has been hailed as an important new play by an important new writer on the American scene. Miss Hansberry, first let me ask you this: recently the New York Drama Critics voted that you had written the best play of the season, better than plays written by Tennessee Williams, Archibald MacLeish, Eugene O’Neill. As a heretofore unknown writer, a twenty-eight-, or is it twenty-nine-year-old girl, what was your reaction to that kind of a claim?

Lorraine Hansberry: Well, I received it happily. I felt that our piece was substantial and honest, and the craft of it rather satisfies me. I think I would have liked it as a play if I had just walked in.

MW: John Chapman, the drama critic for the New York Daily News, wrote that he has great respect for your play, but he feels perhaps that part of the acclaim may be a sentimental reaction—“an admirable gesture,” I think, is the way that he put it—to the fact that you are a Negro and one of the few Negroes ever to have written a good Broadway play.

LH: I’ve heard this alluded to in other ways. I didn’t see Mr. Chapman’s piece. I would imagine that if I were given the award because they wanted to give it to a Negro, it would be the first time in the history of this country that anyone had ever been given anything for being a Negro. I don’t think it’s a very complimentary assessment of an honest piece of work … or of his colleagues’ intent.

MW: He says that A Raisin in the Sun—well, let me quote him. He said, “If one sets aside the one, unusual fact that it is a Negro work, A Raisin in the Sun becomes no more than a solid and enjoyable commercial play.”

LH: Well, I’ve heard this said, too. I don’t know quite what people mean. If they are trying to speak about it honestly, if they are trying to really analyze the play dramaturgically, there is no such assessment. You can’t say that if you take away the American character of something then it just becomes, you know, something else. The Negro character of these people is intrinsic to the play. It’s important to it. If it’s a good play, it’s good with that.

MW: Is it fair to say that even in proportion very few Negroes have distinguished themselves as playwrights, novelists, and poets? There have been a few, including yourself, but not many. How come?

LH: Well, whether they have distinguished themselves is kind of difficult to discuss, because we always have to keep in mind the circumstances and the framework that Negroes do anything in America, which, of course, is a hostile circumstance. We have been writing poetry since the seventeenth century in this country and publishing, been writing plays that simply never see the light of day because the circumstance, as I say, is hostile.

MW: But the same is not true in the case of Negro athletes, Negro entertainers. I think in proportion there are more o...