Lorraine Vivian Hansberry, playwright, and writer was the first African American female author to have a play performed on broadway. Her plays focused on racial segregation and the lives of Black Americans.

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. She focused on African struggles for liberation and their impact on the world much early in her life. Hansberry's writings also discussed her lesbianism and the oppression of homosexuality.

Hansberry’s play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, a drama of political questioning and assertion set in Greenwich Village, New York City, where she had long made her home, had only a modest run on Broadway in 1964. She died at a very young age due to pancreatic cancer and yet she is remembered through her plays and her activism. In 2010, Hansberry was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.