Twice Militant: Lorraine Hansberry's Letters to "The Ladder"

Lorraine Hansberry

In the late 1950s, the fight for gay rights was developing alongside the growing Civil Rights and feminist movements. An important voice in the Civil Rights struggle was author, essayist, and activist Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965), the award-winning playwright of A Raisin in the Sun. This exhibition explores a largely unknown but significant aspect of Hansberry’s biography connecting her to the gay rights movement: the letters she wrote in 1957 to The Ladder, the first subscription-based lesbian publication in the United States.

The Ladder, and published in its May 1957 issue. The writer was identified only by her initials, L.H.N.

The reason that Ms. Hansberry was so excited about the little magazine was that it was published by and for lesbians — a trailblazing publication that spoke directly to Ms. Hansberry, who was married at the time to the Broadway producer Robert B. Nemiroff but knew by then that she was drawn to women.

At the time, the so-called Comstock laws prohibited promoting immoral behavior, which could have included this earnest discussion of lesbianism.

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, via Lorraine Hansberry Properties Trust

"... in order for a person to bear his life, he needs a valid re-creation of that life, which is why, as Ray Charles might put it, blacks chose to sing the blues. This is why Raisin in the Sun meant so much to black people - on the stage: the film is another matter. In the theater, a current flowed back and forth between the audience and the actors, flesh and blood corroborating flesh and blood – as we say, testifying... The root argument of the play is really far more subtle than either its detractors or the bulk of its admirers were able to see." (James Baldwin in The Devil FindsWork, 1976) 

 Ms. Hansberry tells Mr. Terkel that “the most oppressed group of any oppressed group will be its women,” and says that those who are “twice oppressed” may become “twice militant.” 
Lorraine Hansberry (1930 - 1965)

"The unmistakable roots of the universal solidarity of the colored peoples of the world are no longer "predictable" as they were in my father's time – they are here. And I for one, as a black woman in the United States in the mid-Twentieth Century, feel that I am more typical of the present temperament of my people than not, when I say that I cannot allow the devious purposes of white supremacy to lead me to any conclusion other than what may be to most robust and important one of our time: that the ultimate destiny and aspirations of the African peoples and twenty million American Negroes are inextricably and magnificently bound up together forever."