American playwright Lorraine Hansberry was BOTD in 1930. Born and raised in Chicago to a prominent African-American family, her father founded one of the first banks for Black people in Chicago, and her parents were friends with activists including W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson. When Lorraine was seven, her family bought a house in the white neighbourhood of Woodlawn to challenge a restrictive covenant preventing Black people from living there. Neighbours filed a lawsuit to prevent them from moving in, and the family was subject to harassment and violence. They were forced to leave their home after the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the racist law, though the judgment was overturned in 1940 by the US Supreme Court. Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin and the Art Institute of Chicago, before moving to New York City to pursue a writing career. She became an overnight celebrity with her debut play A Raisin in the Sun, a searing family drama based on her family’s experience of racial segregation. Produced in New York in 1959 and starring Sidney Poitier, it was a critical and commercial success, making Hansberry the first African-American woman to have a play produced on Broadway. She became a central figure in the Black civil rights movement, joining James Baldwin and Robeson in a meeting with Attorney-General Robert F. Kennedy to open a dialogue between the government and activists. Hansberry demanded that Kennedy make a “moral commitment” to desegregation, walking out in disgust. supported the African decolonisation movement, feminist and anti-nuclear campaigns. Married to Robert Nemiroff for ten years, she had a number of affairs with women, and became cautiously involved in the burgeoning gay rights movement. She died in 1965 of pancreatic cancer aged 34. After her death, her selected writings were produced on Broadway as Young, Gifted and Black, later published in book form. In 1970, her friend Nina Simone wrote the song Young Gifted and Black in her honour.