Playwright Lorraine Hansberry is buried in our village. Four Croton student filmmakers bring her memory back to life.

Hansberry spent much of the last few years of her life at a house in Croton she mischievously called "Chitterling Heights." Some villagers are working hard to keep her legacy alive.

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Lorraine Hansberry, the playwright most famous for “A Raisin in the Sun,” came to Croton in 1961 for peace, quiet, and the ability to write without the constant interruptions of New York City life. Sadly, her time here was short: On January 12, 1965, she died at age 34 from cancer, and is now buried in Croton’s Bethel Cemetery.

But Hansberry left her mark on Croton in many ways. Last Saturday, February 3, the Lorraine Hansberry Coalition of Croton—established in 2021 to celebrate Hansberry’s life and to further her legacy—hosted a short student film about Hansberry at the Croton Free Library, featuring interviews with three Croton residents who had known her to various degrees.

The film was first shown last June, at a two-week long commemoration of the 60th anniversary of one of Croton’s most historic events: A civil rights rally, chaired by Hansberry, held at Temple Israel and which drew 1000 participants. In 1963, many African-Americans still did not have a real right to vote in many Southern states. The Civil Rights Act was not passed by Congress until the following year, and the Voting Rights Act not until 1965.

The film, “Lorraine Hansberry in the 1960s: An Introspective,” was made by four Croton-Harmon High School students: Declan Caulfield, Tuula Moorhead, Sasha Ranis, and Maya Sebestyen. Three of the four were on hand to participate in a panel after the film showing; Tuula Moorhead was out of the country, but sent a statement which was read by Maya.

For the film, the students interviewed three Crotonites who knew Hansberry in various ways: Cornelia Cotton, who met her at her Croton house when she was delivering telephone books one day; Lois Waldman, who invested in Hansberry’s second play, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window;” and civil rights activist Seth Davis, whose parents were close friends of the family of Hansberry’s husband, Robert Nemiroff, and who lived in Croton between 1955 and 2015.

Courtesy Lorraine Hansberry Coalition of Croton

Hansberry’s house in Croton was in a forested area off of Quaker Bridge Road. In her last years she spent a lot of time there with her dogs Chaka and Spice as well as her many visitors, especially Dorothy Secules, with whom she had a long romantic relationship.

(Hansberry had married Jewish songwriter and Communist activist Robert Nemiroff in 1953; although they separated several years later and divorced in 1962, Hansberry and Nemiroff remained close friends until her death, and Nemiroff continued to work hard to preserve her legacy.)

Hansberry could afford to buy the Croton house, which she tongue-in-cheek called “Chitterling Heights,” because of the electrifying success of “A Raisin in the Sun.” After touring for some time in other cities, the play made it to Broadway on March 11, 1959. As the African-American studies scholar Imani Perry put it in her excellent biography, “Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry:”

“Broadway audiences had never before seen the work of a Black playwright and director {Lloyd Richards], featuring a Black cast with no singing, dancing, or slaptstick and a clear social message.”

“A Raisin in the Sun” played at the Ethel Barrymore Theater for 19 months before moving to the Belasco Theater, where it ran for another eight months. Hansberry won the Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, when she was only 28 years old.

Hansberry’s success turned her into an overnight celebrity, and she did not shy away from using her fame to speak her mind publicly and bluntly. Hansberry was a dedicated leftist and onetime Communist whose politics ranged from radical to revolutionary depending on the topic. And while she was already ill by 1963, and in and out of the hospital, she summoned the strength to help organize the civil rights rally in Croton.

New York Public Library

Courtesy Croton Historical Society

The rally raised $5000 for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which in turn used it to buy a Ford station wagon for the freedom riders who were working on the voting rights campaigns in the South. Almost exactly a year later, the station wagon was found burned and empty in Mississippi; two months after that, the bodies of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were found by authorities.

After the film showing at the library, the three students who were present gathered on stage for a panel moderated by John Williams, CEO of ReelWorks, which mentors young filmmakers. Williams had done a one-day workshop with the students, but the film was impressively professional and well-edited. The students spoke about their experiences talking to people who had actually known Hansberry.

“It was amazing to talk to these people who knew her pretty well, were at her funeral, and invested in her plays,” Sasha Ranis said. “We were with them for quite a while.” Sasha also expressed regret that there were some subjects they were not able to interview.

The students seemed to have a keen awareness that while “we’re not living in the 1960s anymore,” as Maya Sebestyen put it, things have not changed as much as one might hope. “Croton was white and Westchester was segregated back then,” Sasha added. “It has changed, but not to a large degree.”

While Croton is rightly proud of the many celebrities who have lived here over the decades, one can wonder how the village would handle Lorraine Hansberry if she were alive and living amongst us today. 

Hansberry was a militant civil rights activist, a political radical, a partially out lesbian, married for a number of years to a Jewish Communist. If Hansberry were alive today she might not keep herself mostly cloistered in her house off Quaker Bridge Road.

Perhaps Hansberry would come down from the hills of Croton from time to time to have coffee at The Black Cow, and perhaps even host political discussions around the coffee house’s long center table. She might even write letters to The Gazette lamenting the death toll in Gaza.

If so, one must hope that no one would declare Hansberry a ”bad influence” on our local high school students, including those who have now honored her with a heartfelt film documentary.

Note: A number of scenes of Lorraine Hansberry at her home in Croton and walking outside among the red-leaved trees are featured in the superb 1986 documentary “Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart.” It can be viewed on Amazon Prime for a small fee.

Hansberry’s grave in Croton’s Bethel Cemetery/ Courtesy Croton Friends of History

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