Today in History—March 11: A Raisin in the Sun Makes Theatrical History

When the lights dimmed and the curtain rose at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theatre on this day in 1959, history was made—twice.

With the opening of A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry became the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway, and Lloyd Richards became the first Black director of a Broadway production. That night marked the beginning of the play’s unlikely ascent to becoming one of the most important works in American drama.

The road to Broadway was hardly guaranteed. “Young, gifted, and Black,” Hansberry was just 29 and had never had a play produced. It took a year to raise the necessary funding. Potential investors warned that white audiences would not pay to see a story about a Black family that had only one white actor in its cast.

When Raisin finally opened in New York, the naysayers were proved wrong: The response was electric. Critics praised its emotional force and social insight. The title comes from Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem”: “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?…Or does it explode?” Written in the thick of the civil rights movement, Hansberry’s drama asks that question without providing easy answers.

While grounded in the social issues of the day, the play is, at its core, a family drama: The Younger family lives on Chicago’s South Side, crowded into a small apartment and arguing over how to use a $10,000 insurance check. Should they leave and buy a house in a white neighborhood? Or invest in a liquor store in hopes of financial independence? Hansberry insisted the play was not autobiographical, but its roots were close to home. In 1937 Hansberry’s father bought a house in a white neighborhood; the family faced open hostility, and they were eventually forced to vacate.

Hansberry won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play, becoming the first Black playwright and the youngest American to receive the honor. But her budding promise as a playwright was cut short—Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer just six years after her historic play debuted. More than 600 mourners attended her funeral in Harlem. Martin Luther King, Jr., sent a tribute, praising her “creative ability and her profound grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today,” predicting that her work would inspire generations to come.