Lorraine Hansberry, who died at age thirty-four, was best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, but her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements. Her unflinching commitment to social justice brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now.
Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, where she also teaches in the law and public affairs and gender and sexuality studies programs. Perry holds a BA from Yale and a PhD in American studies and a law degree from Harvard. She is the author of Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop and More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States.
Certain books were “banned in Boston” at least as far back as 1651, when one William Pynchon wrote a book criticizing Puritanism.