Quote by Lorraine Hansberry: “Do I remain a revolutionary intellectual who is opposed to the decay around me?”

This is Hansberry asking herself the hardest question any thinking person must face: do you keep your integrity when the world makes compromise easy? It is about what it costs to stay awake and keep fighting rather than slowly adjusting to what is wrong.

Hansberry wrote this in her journals in the early 1960s, a period of intense civil rights struggle in the United States. She was among the first to challenge the pace and vision of mainstream civil rights leadership, and she died of cancer in 1965 at just 34 years old, leaving behind journals that would only later reveal the depth of her political thought.

American playwright and activist, the first Black woman to have a play performed on Broadway with A Raisin in the Sun in 1959. Her essays and letters reveal a radical political thinker whose influence on African American cultural life extended well beyond theatre.