African American playwright and essayist Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965) was born on this day in Chicago, Illinois. At age 20, she moved to Harlem and wrote for Paul Robeson’s progressive newspaper, Freedom.

“Money is life. Once upon a time freedom used to be life—now it’s money,” she wrote in her 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, the title inspired by a poem by Langston Hughes.

This masterpiece, which captured the spirit of the American Civil Rights Movement, was the first written by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway.

A living-room drama, the play was inspired by Hansberry’s own family experiences and spoke deeply to the heart of an emerging Black audience chasing the American Dream.

“For a person to bear his life, he needs a valid re-creation of that life,” she said. “Which is why, as Ray Charles might put it, Blacks chose to sing the blues.”

Hailed as “a watershed in American drama” and named the best play of 1959 by The New York Drama Critics Circle, A Raisin in the Sun was made into a 1961 film starring Sidney Poitier and earned a special award at the Cannes Film Festival.

“Never be afraid to sit awhile and think,” said Hansberry. Although her promising life and career were cut short by pancreatic cancer, her voice lives on as an enduring inspiration.

The talented writer once observed: “There is always something left to love. And if you ain’t learned that, you ain’t learned nothing.”