Lorainne Hansberry

“God is one idea I don’t accept.”

Any school in America will teach you that Lorainne Hansberry was the first black woman to put a play on Broadway, and that is true, she wrote A Raisin In the Sun in 1959. What they will probably not tell you is that when that show went on Hansberry was young, brilliant, queer as fuck, and an atheist on top of it, and when those Broadway audiences showed up in 1959 they heard her declare, “God is one idea I don’t accept, and I get tired of Him getting credit for all the things the human race achieves through its own stubborn effort. There simply is no blasted god—there is only man, and it is he who makes miracles!”