artists as people whose sole purpose should be to uncover the illusion of America. He insists that“ the artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.”
In the 1940s, a decade before Baldwin would meet Hansberry, he was in a community with Harlem Renaissance writers and soon to be expatriates Richard Wright and Countee Cullen, and shared a unique and transformative relationship with visual artist Beaufort Delaney. Baldwin biographer David Leeming tells us that“ Delaney was to reconcile for his protégé the music of the Harlem streets with the music of the Harlem churches, and this helped Baldwin reconcile his sexual awakening with his artistic awakening.”
Baldwin’ s politicization in Harlem, the Village, and Paris functioned like a rites of passage and offers insight into where he was at the first point of connection with Lorraine. By the time they formally met, he was an openly queer public intellectual expatriate and an established novelist, playwright, and essayist. Baldwin had become, as he would say,“ The artist here to disturb the peace.”
Lorraine Hansberry was twenty-nine to Jimmy Baldwin’ s thirty-four when she walked into the Actor’ s Studio in the winter of 1958, where Giovanni’ s Room was being workshopped for stage production. She had heard of Baldwin’ s work and he was aware of her organizing and journalistic grind. At this production, in the face of unfavorable responses to the play by Broadway executives, Hansberry publicly defended Baldwin’ s willingness to introduce theater audiences to homosexual content, which spoke to her own developing feminist and queer politics. This fearless representation of sexual diversity, Hansberry felt, was consistent with the voice an artist must have if they are to be agents of social change. She saw Baldwin as an ally to which he responded,“ I was enormously grateful to her, she seemed to speak for me; and afterward she talked to me with a gentleness and generosity never to be forgotten.”( Baldwin: 1969).
Hansberry’ s clarity about the role of an artist developed long before meeting Baldwin in 1958. She was a highly visible activist and public intellectual, politicized by her family’ s social justice work in Chicago. When she moved to New York in 1951, she was immediately employed as a writer for Paul Robeson’ s Pan Africanist and communist inspired newspaper called Freedom, a publication edited by Louis E. Burnman whom she also identified as a mentor. Like Baldwin, but from a different proximity, Hansberry too was shaped by the Harlem Renaissance and cited Langston Hughes as being one of the most influential writers on her work. A one-time student enrolled in a W. E. B. DuBois African studies course, and a person drawn to the work of fellow journalist for Freedom and Black woman playwright Alice Childress, she learned early that in the achievement of Black rights, artists didn’ t have the luxury to surrender their platforms to merely entertain, nor did she prescribe to one particular political strategy in the pursuit of social justice. In a 1962 speech titled“ A Challenge to Artist,” Hansberry speaks candidly about her impatience with apolitical artists, saying:
“ Finally, I think that all of us who are thinking such things [ as civil rights ], who wish to exercise these rights that we are here defending tonight, must really exercise them. Speaking to my fellow artists in particular, I think that we must paint them, sing them, write about them— all these matters which are not currently fashionable. Otherwise … we are indulging in a luxurious complicity— and no other thing.”
Perhaps one of the most compelling occurrences that affirm the intimate relationship between Baldwin and Hansberry was expressed in a letter he had written to his brother David from the South of France. In the 1965 letter he writes,“ The night of January 12, when my fever reached its rather alarming peak, was the night Lorraine Hansberry died.” He described his condition that evening as a psychosomatic one. Two years leading up to Hansberry’ s passing, Baldwin was devastated by the season of death that reached across transnational borders to engulf his life. He returned to America to address the 16th Street Baptist church bombing that killed four little girls, the abduction and murder of civil rights workers( James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner) in Mississippi, and the murder of Medgar Evers on his porch in front of his family. Just one month after Hansberry’ s passing would be the assassination of Malcolm X, who attended Hansberry’ s funeral and who Baldwin was scheduled to meet with, along with Martin L. King Jr. on February 23, two days after Malcolm was killed. It was in the spirit of grief and gratitude that
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