Shortly afterward, Hansberry herself was nearly killed by a brick hurled through a window by angry whites. Hansberry remembers her mother's "standing guard" many times with a loaded gun in order to protect her family from the violence of racism. Such traumatic memories were probably a part of the reason that Hansberry incorporated into her first play the theme of a black family's courageous decision to move into a hostile and new environment.
When Hansberry enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, she had every intention of remaining there for the four years necessary for graduation. However, after two years, her growing interest in the arts took her other places for brief periods. She attended the Art Institute of Chicago, Roosevelt College, the New School of Social Research in New York, and studied art in Guadalajara, Mexico. In New York, she worked on the staff of Paul Robeson's Freedom magazine, hung around the theater, read plays, and honed her craft. Several critics have noted that Hansberry's artwork, her drawings and sketches, is almost as noteworthy as her writing.
Her father's death at the age of fifty-one touched Hansberry deeply; she often said that it was perhaps her father's constant baffle with the forces of racism that hastened his early death. Interestingly, the cause and effect of much of the action in Raisin evolves as a consequence of the death of Big Walter, a character whom the audience never sees, although much of the dialogue contains references to him.
