Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart

When Lorraine Hansberry’s now classic A Raisin in the Sun premiered on Broadway in 1959 (the first play by a Black woman to do so) actress Ruby Dee recalls marveling how it “opened a new chapter in theater, that included Black people.” While most may know the widely studied and performed A Raisin in the Sun as their only reference point for Hansberry, the documentary Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart makes abundantly clear that there is much more to know about the author. The filmmakers combed archives worldwide and had unprecedented access to Hansberry’s personal papers, archives, home movies and photos in order to present her complex life. Like her writing and activism, the film draws attention to some of the most outstanding issues of the mid-Twentieth Century and beyond (racial justice, colonialism, feminism, class divisions, sexuality) and addresses the role of artists and intellectuals in bringing them to center stage.

Hansberry was born in 1930 in Chicago into a well-to-do family of Southern migrants. Her father Carl ran a real estate business and was the plaintiff in an historic and successful housing discrimination case. The family’s move into a white neighborhood in the 1930s was met with violence and this experience was thought to inform Lorraine’s writing of A Raisin in the Sun. During the nascent Cold War years, she joined the Communist Party and associated groups and later became a staff member at Freedom newspaper, co-founded by Paul Robeson. She soon began writing full time when she and her husband moved to New York’s Greenwich Village. Their contacts from the progressive Left ultimately proved helpful in finding backers for A Raisin in the Sun.

Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart sheds valuable light on all aspects of the play, including the daunting challenge of securing investment and a venue for this production about a working class Black family, the casting process, artistic debates and finally its public reception. The film features interviews with the play’s original cast members, Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Louis Gossett, Jr. and Glynn Turman, director Lloyd Richards,producer Phil Rose, supporter Harry Belafonte as well as writer Amiri Baraka along with excerpts from the 1961 Hollywood movie.

The play emerged during the burgeoning modern Civil Rights Movement. Leveraging her increased prominence, Hansberry, along with a circle of artist/activist friends such as James Baldwin and Nina Simone, became a fierce advocate. She particularly admired the more militant youth sector such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She raised funds for SNCC and wrote the text for their book, The Movement.

The film reveals how central feminism was to her ideas and boldly acknowledges (using her diary entries) her same gender relationships and private lesbian identity before the emergence of the gay rights movement.

When she died in 1965 from cancer at the early age of 34, she left behind several unfinished plays and other projects which promised to enrich our cultural landscape. One wonders how public discourse would have been different if she had survived to opine on the important longstanding and current social issues through her literary works as well as in her role as a leading public intellectual. Princeton professor Imani Perry comments in the documentary that Hansberry has "left us a road map for how to think about our society as we try to pursue something deeply egalitarian and sensitive and recognizes people at every level of who they are."

The documentary's title comes from Hansberry's belief that “one cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know or react to the miseries which afflict this world.”

The Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust (LHLT) functions as the official and authorized organization representing the writer Lorraine Hansberry. The mission of the LHLT is to steward the legacy of the celebrated playwright and ensure that her works and her commitment to art, social change, and human evolution continues to inspire us around the world.

For more on Lorraine Hansberry, Beacon Press has released the multi-dimensional and illuminating biography: Looking for Lorraine by Princeton professor Imani Perry.

May 19, 2020 would have been Lorraine Hansberry’s 90th birthday. On that date, New York's Town Hall sponsored a special virtual event: “Lorraine Hansberry: Black Radical”. Filmmaker Tracy Heather Strain and Hansberry biographer Prof. Imani Perry were in conversation with host Melay Araya. The event is archived.