from “Playwright”

By Lillian Ro
The New Yorker
May 9, 1959 Issue

❖ Purpose for reading: What does Hansberry’s father value more: being
a successful businessman or being treated fairly? Locate textual
evidence to support your answer.

My father left the South as a young man, and then he went back there and
got himself an education. He was a wonderful and very special kind of
man. He died in 1945, at the age of fifty-one—of a cerebral hemorrhage,
supposedly, but American racism helped kill him. My brother Carl had just
come back from Europe, where he fought with Patton’s army. My father
wanted to leave this country because, although he had tried to do
everything in his power to make it otherwise, he felt he still didn’t have his
freedom. He was a very successful and very wealthy business restrictive
covenant which he fought all the way up to the Supreme Court, and which
he won after the expenditure of a great deal of money and emotional
strength. The case is studied today in the law schools. Anyway, Daddy felt
that this country was hopeless in its treatment of Negroes. So he became a
refugee from America. He bought a house in Polanco, a suburb of Mexico
City, and we were planning to move there when he died. I was fourteen at
the time. I’m afraid I have to agree with Daddy’s assessment of this
country. But I don’t agree with the leaving part. I don’t feel defensive.
Daddy really belonged to a different age, a different period. He didn’t feel
free. One of the reasons I feel so free is that I feel I belong to a world
majority, and a very assertive one. I’m not really writing about my own
family in the play. We were more typical of the bourgeois Negro
exemplified by the Murchison family that is referred to in the play. I’m too
close to my own family to be able to write about them.