I like to imagine Lorraine Hansberry and Robert Nemiroff in Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Park while they were dating. She was the associate editor of Paul Robeson’s newspaper, Freedom, in Harlem; he was finishing up a graduate degree in English literature at New York University. He would lie back on the grass and listen to Lorraine reading poetry aloud.
But after examining the 109 boxes of her papers that Nemiroff and his third wife, Jewell Gresham-Nemiroff—a Black activist and playwright —curated for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem, I was surprised to discover how important he was in Hansberry’s life.
