![]() ![]() While Lorraine was growing up she was frequently exposed to the perspectives of such young African students who were regularly invited home to family dinners.Īlthough they could afford good private schools, Lorraine was educated in the segregated public schools as her family worked within the system to change the laws governing segregation. So important was he to Africa especially that a college at the University of Nigeria was named in his honor. As a scholar of African history who taught at Howard University, his students included some of the most decisive figures in African nationalism such as Kwame Nkrumah first president of Ghana and Nnamdi Azikwe, the first Nigerian president. who taught there until 1959 after rejecting employment offers from Atlanta University and the Honorable Marcus Garvey was another important influence on her. Lorraine’s uncle, Willliam Leo Hansberry, a Howard University professor of African history in D.C. DuBois, Joe Louis and Langston Hughes frequented their home as Lorraine was growing up. Because of their stature in the black community such important black leaders as Paul Robeson, W.E.B. At the time of Lorraine’s birth, she had become an influential society matron who hosted major cultural and literary figuresīoth parents were activists challenging discriminating Jim Crow Laws. 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. 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.Ĭarl 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. The roots of her artistic vision and activism are here in Chicago.īorn into a family of substantial means and parents who were intellectuals and activists, her father, Carl Augustus Hansberry, Sr. ![]() Lorraine Vivian Hansberry born 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. ![]()
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