Lorraine was born into a successful family in Chicago. Both her parents were activists challenging Jim Crow laws. Lorraine moved to New York after finishing college, and there married Robert Nemiroff, a White Jewish intellectual whom she met on a protest picket line.

She worked as editor for Paul Robeson's radical Black newspaper "Freedom" until her husband's songwriting career success allowed her to devote herself to her playwriting.

Her most successful work was "A Raisin In the Sun." The play was based on her childhood experience of desegregating a White neighborhood. The play won her the New York Drama Critic's Circle Award as Best Play of the Year. She was the youngest American, the fifth woman and the first Black to win the award. Unfortunately, she lived only six years after her initial success.