Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was an American 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 in Chicago living under racial segregation. 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 U.S. Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.
Phylicia Rashad is an American actress. She was most recently dean of the College of Fine Arts at Howard University before her three year contract ended in May 2024. She is best known for her role as Clair Huxtable on the sitcom The Cosby Show (1984–1992) which earned her two Primetime Emmy Award nominations in 1985 and 1986. She also played Ruth Lucas on Cosby (1996–2000).
Raisin is a musical with music by Judd Woldin, lyrics by Robert Brittan, and a book by Robert Nemiroff and Charlotte Zaltzberg. It is an adaptation of the Lorraine Hansberry play A Raisin in the Sun; the musical's book was co-written by Hansberry's husband, Robert Nemiroff.
Alice Childress was an American novelist, playwright, and actress, acknowledged as "the only African-American woman to have written, produced, and published plays for four decades." Childress described her work as trying to portray the have-nots in a have society, saying: "My writing attempts to interpret the 'ordinary' because they are not ordinary. Each human is uniquely different. Like snowflakes, the human pattern is never cast twice. We are uncommonly and marvellously intricate in thought and action, our problems are most complex and, too often, silently borne." Childress became involved in social causes, and formed an off-Broadway union for actors.
Joyce Oldham Appleby was an American historian. She was a professor of history at UCLA. She was president of the Organization of American Historians (1991) and the American Historical Association (1997).
Shauneille Gantt Perry Ryder was an American stage director and playwright. She was one of the first African-American women to direct off-Broadway.
Nellie Yvonne McKay was an American academic and author who was the Evjue-Bascom Professor of American and African-American Literature at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she also taught in English and women's studies, and is best known as the co-editor of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature.
Mary Beth Norton is an American historian, specializing in American colonial history and well known for her work on women's history and the Salem witch trials. She is the Mary Donlon Alger Professor Emeritus of American History at the Department of History at Cornell University. Norton served as president of the American Historical Association in 2018. She is a recipient of the Ambassador Book Award in American Studies for In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. Norton received her Bachelor of Arts at the University of Michigan (1964). The next year she completed a Master of Arts, going on to receive her Ph.D. in 1969 at Harvard University. She identifies as a Democrat and she considers herself a Methodist. Mary Beth Norton is a pioneer of women historians not only in the United States but also in the whole world, as she was the first woman to get a job in the department of history at Cornell University.
Claudia Dale Goldin is an American economic historian and labor economist. She is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. In October 2023, she was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for having advanced our understanding of women's labor market outcomes”. The third woman to win the award, she was the first woman to win the award solo.
Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is an American civil rights advocate and a scholar of critical race theory. She is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues.
Melissa Victoria Harris-Perry, formerly known as Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell, is an American writer, the Presidential Chair Professor of Politics & International Affairs and head of The Anna Julia Cooper Project at Wake Forest University, television host, and political commentator with a focus on African-American politics. Harris-Perry hosted the Melissa Harris-Perry weekend news on MSNBC from 2012 to February 27, 2016.
William Leo Hansberry was an American scholar, lecturer and pioneering Afrocentrist. He was the older brother of real estate broker Carl Augustus Hansberry, uncle of award-winning playwright Lorraine Hansberry and great-granduncle of actress Taye Hansberry.
A Raisin in the Sun is a play by Lorraine Hansberry that debuted on Broadway in 1959. The title comes from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes. The story tells of a black family's experiences in south Chicago, as they attempt to improve their financial circumstances with an insurance payout following the death of the father, and deals with matters of housing discrimination, racism, and assimilation. The New York Drama Critics' Circle named it the best play of 1959, and in recent years publications such as The Independent and Time Out have listed it among the best plays ever written.
The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window is the second and last staged play by playwright Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun. The play focuses on events that occur after Sidney hangs a political sign urging the end to bossism in the window of his Greenwich Village apartment. Chaos ensues in his marriage and personal relationships and raises questions about Bohemian culture, Judaism, race, suicide, homosexuality, political corruption, interracial love, and prostitution.
Endesha Ida Mae Holland was an American scholar, playwright, and civil rights activist.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is an American academic, writer, and activist. She is a professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (2016). For this book, Taylor received the 2016 Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book from the Lannan Foundation. She is a co-publisher of Hammer & Hope, an online magazine that began in 2023.
Elizabeth Hinton is an American historian. She is Professor of History, African American Studies, and Law at Yale University and Yale Law School. Her research focuses on the persistence of poverty and racial inequality in the twentieth-century United States. Hinton was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.
Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús is an American anthropologist, academic, author, and editor. She is the Olden Street Professor of American Studies at Princeton University, and chair of the Effron Center for the Study of America. She is the author of two books, Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion (2015) and Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence and the Invention of a Disease (2024). Beliso-De Jesús is also the editor-in-chief of Transforming Anthropology.
Freedom was a monthly newspaper focused on African-American issues published from 1950 to 1955. The publication was associated primarily with the internationally renowned singer, actor and then officially disfavored activist Paul Robeson, whose column, with his photograph, ran on most of its front pages. Freedom's motto was: "Where one is enslaved, all are in chains!" The newspaper has been described as "the most visible African American Left cultural institution during the early 1950s." In another characterization, "Freedom paper was basically an attempt by a small group of black activists, most of them Communists, to provide Robeson with a base in Harlem and a means of reaching his public... The paper offered more coverage of the labor movement than nearly any other publication, particularly of the left-led unions that were expelled from the CIO in the late 1940s... [It] encouraged its African American readership to identify its struggles with anti-colonial movements in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Freedom gave extensive publicity to... the struggle against apartheid."
Camp Unity was a communist-affiliated summer resort for adults located in Wingdale, New York. It was one of the first multiracial camps of its kind in the United States.
