My Schomburg Experience (Redefined)
Steven G. Fullwood, archivist, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, shares one of his favorite items from the Schomburg collection:
Letter from Lorraine Hansberry to Robert Nemiroff, May 13, 1959 (Lorraine Hansberry Papers).
“While primarily known as the award-winning playwright of A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry was also a civil rights activist. Her writings include essays, articles, short stories and poems. In a letter to her husband Robert Nemiroff, Hansberry discusses a speech she gave at Roosevelt University. Hansberry remarks that the speech itself ‘was brilliant, and in other places…sort of vague. I just can’t seem to tie things down the way they are in my mind.’ Anyone who has ever endeavored to articulate their ideas can relate to that statement. This letter captures the thought process of an intellectual who labored intensely over her work.”
Join Steven on a guided tour of the Romare Bearden exhibition at the Schomburg on October 5, 2011. For more information, please click here.
Photo Credit: The Movement by Lorraine Hansberry, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library.
