Lorraine Vivian Hansberry born May 19, 1930 in Chicago, Illinois as the youngest of four children of a prominent real estate broker Carl Augustus Hansberry and Nannie Louise Perry grew up on the south side of Chicago in the Woodlawn neighborhood.in a middle-class family.. The roots of her artistic vision and activism are here in Chicago.
Born into a family of substantial means and parents who were intellectuals and activists, her father, Carl Augustus Hansberry, Sr. from Gloucester, Mississippi, moved to Chicago after attending Alcorn College, and became known as the “kitchenette king” after subdividing large homes vacated by whites moving to the suburbs and selling these small apartments or kitchenettes to African American migrants from the South.
Carl was not only a successful real estate businessman,but an inventor and a politician as well being an active member of the Republican Party who ran for congress in 1940. Hansberry’s mother, Nannie Perry, the college educated daughter of an African Methodist Episcopal minister,who became a schoolteacher and, later, ward committeewoman, was from Tennessee. At the time of Lorraine’s birth, she had become an influential society matron who hosted major cultural and literary figures Read the rest of this entry »