Lorraine Hansberry's Freedom Family
Abstract
Lorraine Hansberry and the periodical Freedom both appeared in New York City in November 1950, and soon would be united in a marriage of true minds. Hansberry, as she would recall, was “twenty-one & confused and stifled inside” 1 when she wandered into “a somewhat bare and harrowed Harlem office overlooking Lenox Avenue. An office furnished with two desks, one typewriter and a remarkably enthusiastic working staff of two,” 2 the office manager, Edith Roberts, and the editor, Louis E. Burnham. Hansberry knew she had found safe harbor. “I work for the new Negro paper, FREEDOM, which in its time in history ought to be the journal of Negro liberation … in fact, it will be,” 3 she proclaimed shortly after joining the staff (at a weekly salary of $31.70) to work “as subscription clerk, receptionist, typist and editorial assistant,” 4 a job description Burnham published under the headline “In the Freedom Family.” For once a journalistic clich reveals a deeper truth. What Hansberry found during the two years she worked full-time at Freedom was nurture. The people she met, the expanded range of progressive politics, the workaday routine, and, perhaps most of all, the knowledge that there