And Still They Rise

How a community - and a legacy - of black playwrights and theater-makers has transformed the american stage

- By Imani Perry

In 1959, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun arrived on the Great White Way, as Broadway was (unironically) nicknamed. At the time, in Montgomery, Alabama, bus segregation had recently been toppled. In Ghana, independence from Great Britain had been achieved. It was the precipice of the 1960s, a period of radical change.

It was against that backdrop that Hansberry, a 28-year-old Black woman from Chicago, made her Broadway debut with a play about a working-class family on the city's South Side, where she had grown up. With A Raisin in the Sun, she brought three Black women to the apex of American theater: Lena Younger, the matriarch with a sense of humor and spiritual conviction; Ruth Younger, a domestic who was exploring reproductive choices and longed for a place in the world; and Beneatha, a hardheaded feminist and brilliant yet sophomoric future doctor.

It would be 17 years before another production written by a Black woman appeared on Broadway; Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the Rainbow Is Enuf premiered at the Booth Theatre in the fall of 1976. Shange, who also performed in early versions of for colored girls, brought a new dramatic form to the stage: the choreo-poem, which combines poetry, movement, music, and song. Seven Black female characters act as a chorus of autoethnographic voices and bodies telling deeply resonant and radically honest stories of the cruelty they've endured and the love they've carried inside their tender interior lives.