When Hansberry left Madison for New York, she moved in progressive political circles and eventually joined the Communist Party, and assisted Paul Robeson with the production of a black radical journal, Freedom.

At that time the FBI commenced undercover surveillance and continued to monitor her activities sporadically, and then increased their coverage after the premiere of A Raisin in the Sun, assigning an agent “to determine whether the play in any way follows the Communist line.” Their investigation uncovered no such content, speculating that it “would have never been accepted on Broadway if there were any Communist content.”

After that she divorces and starts submitting letters to the Ladder (a lesbian journal):

I'm glad as heck that you exist. You are obviously serious people and I feel that women, without wishing to foster any strict separatist notions, homo or hetero, indeed have a need for their own publications and organizations. Our problems, our experiences as women are profoundly unique as compared to the other half of the human race. Women, like other oppressed groups of one kind or another, have particularly had to pay a price for the intellectual impoverishment that the second class status imposed on us for centuries created and sustained. Thus, I feel that THE LADDER is a fine, elementary step in a rewarding direction.

We absolutely deserve our own spaces!