I'm not sure how I came across Imani Perry's book Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical LIfe of Lorraine Hansberry. I think it may have shown up in a friend's feed on Goodreads. At any rate, this biography of Lorraine Hansberry, the author of the play A Raisin in the Sun, was an excellent choice to complete this summer's library bingo square: "Read a Book by or for a Person of Color" since it is both by and for. Each time I pick up a book lately which opens new doors for understanding others' experiences in America (the USA, that is...), I feel both sad and invigorated. In her very short life of 34 years, this remarkable woman was an intellectual powerhouse who bowed to no pressures to limit her incisiveness. Perry's biography succeeds in creating a strong portrait of Lorraine as a human being in a divided America dead set against change and also as a young artist who worked tirelessly to put her thoughts and visions into her writing. She was a champion for her people, a Black woman from Chicago who believed that the real value of the struggles in Montgomery and "the subsequent student movements" of the late 50's and early 60's was that "they make it possible for the Negro questions to be forced upon the conscience of a nation which is otherwise delighted to have any number of priority questions that it must always deal with first". Jump forward sixty years and it takes the murder of George Floyd to try once again to raise the conscience of a nation.... and November will tell us whether in fact other questions will be dealt with first. In many places, this book makes me continue to try my best to examine my own beliefs, at least one of which is that the more I educate myself (or encourage others to educate me), the better human being I become. "If people accepted the idea that racism was merely ignorance or misperception, white innocence could be preserved. If instead it was a system bent on the oppression of Black people, and the deliberate destruction of natural ties among members of the human community, then the whole damn nation was guilty." Lorraine was connected to so many powerful people: W.E.B. Dubois, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Nina Simone... and I learned about them, too. Did you know Nina chose her name Simone after Simone de Beauvoir, a woman of great influence in both her and Lorraine's lives? Lorraine's life was centered on the poor and the dispossessed; she frequently railed at the focus on "exceptional" blacks, a category misused in discussions of how to "solve" society's problems. The system needs a great deal of changes, reworkings, prunings, and so on, or nothing will truly change towards the reality of "all men are created equal." I very much appreciated the chapters where Perry discusses A Raisin in the Sun... now I want to see it on stage, or at least (since live performances simply aren't out there at the moment of this pandemic), see the original movie version, which I learned also was heavily cut as far as the scenes she wanted to include in her plea to reveal truth in America. So, even though this was a book hard to get through, it was worth the effort!

Arrived this week in the mail. Thank you for the RABCK!