The Outspoken and Remarkable...Lena Horne (1917- ]

“IN MANY WAYS LENA HORNE embodies the duality of experience for many black American women in the twentieth century. Born in 1917 at the dawn of the Jazz Age, her life encompasses the early pangs of the WOMEN’S and CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENTS and the late twentieth-century recognition of African American women as important contributors to our nation’s development. With Lena Horne, the daughter of a prominent black family, there has never been any question that AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN held the power to change the very fabric of the United States.

OUTSPOKEN, glamorous, and seemingly possessed of an internal flame that radiated from within, Horne moved gracefully from pampered girlfriend in segregated America to an icon of uncomplaining strength, dedicated artistry and deep integrity. “Because time has been good to me, I treat it with respect,” she said in 1989. And in the late nineties, as she entered her ninth decade, Horne continued to work at her craft and with the numerous family and civic interests that distinguished her life in this half of the century.

As a “down-home girl” who began singing at the urging of her strong-willed, aristocratic grandmother, Lena Horne managed to change the face of American entertainment. Her life is rich with contradictions and tragedy, as well as marked by inspiring triumphs. From the creative singer vigor of the Harlem Renaissance to the fertile musical ground of the Cotton Club to the bustling sound stages of Hollywood in its Golden Era, Lena Horne has been involved in some of the most fruitful years in modern American cultural history. Her one-woman Broadway show in 1981 earned her a Tony Award and scored knockout box office in theaters all over the country when she toured with the show. Her friends have included some of the brightest literary, political and musical lights in this century, including composer Billy Strayhorn, writers Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Never a hopeless stargazer, Lena Horne is the first to admit that the going was not always glamorous--and certainly not always easy.

She was born Lena Mary Calhoun Horne in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917. Her mother, Edna Scottron, was a beautiful former debutante. Her Father Ted Horne was a neighborhood star a former playboy turned easygoing bureaucrat, the first black employee of the New York State Department of Labor. He separated from Edna Scottron Horne when Lena was not yet three. But during her earliest years, Lena lived with her mother and father in a well-kept Brooklyn neighborhood. The family enjoyed the benefits of the strong network of black civic groups, churches and businesses that thrived in New York as the nation whirled in the nineteen twenties. Lena made a name for herself early in that community, garnering coverage in the black press in 1919 when she became the youngest member (at the age of two and a half) of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People...

New York’s black community in the twenties--in Harlem and in Brooklyn-teemed with creative and political activity. Lena’s parents were involved in the NAACP at a time when the legendary intellectual W.E.B. DU Bois was it guiding force... The summer of Lena’s birth, the NAACP sponsored several “silent protest parades” against lynching, a barbaric tradition in much of the rural South... After her father’s departure from their Brooklyn brownstone, Lena became one of the few children of divorce in her family’s elite circle... Eventually overwhelmed by the responsibility of raising her child alone, Lena’s mother turned over the raising of her only daughter to Cora Calhoun Horne-Teddy Horne’s stern, socially prominent mother....

Lena attended a private school, the Ethical Culture School, in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn....Soon Lena was a popular fixture in the black middle class social scene in Brooklyn, joining such organization as JACK AND JILL, Junior Debs, Links and the Nonchalants. Cora also took Lena on intercontinental trips, giving the inquisitive young girl exposure to the world beyond Brooklyn.

At the time, it was not unusual for some LIGHT-SKINNED members of this black social class to pass for white. In Cora Horne's’ circle, some of her friends worked at fine department storers in Manhattan, their customers and employees never realizing these women were NEGROES.... By the mid-thirties Lena had become a star in that glittering space where New York’s entertainment world collides with high society...Though not twenty years old, Lena soon became a standout at a legendary nightclub where New York’s cafe society gathered. The death of her beloved grandmother...

Lena flourished in the exhilarating atmosphere of the Cotton Club... In 1934...Lena was spotted in the Cotton Club revue by a Broadway producer. She won the part of a quadroon girl” in a show called Dance With Your Gods, a musical drama about voodoo....For the next few years Lena found regular work in big bands, and in the early forties had established a sizable following... For all of impressive list of stage credits, Lena was young and inexperienced in the ways of romantic relationship. By the time she left New York for California, she had given birth to a daughter, Gail, from a brief marriage to Louis Jones... Lena had earned the disapproval of some of her middle-class family by deciding to go to Hollywood... Lena’s first trip to Hollywood began a long, bittersweet relation with the movie industry. She appeared in dozen of films, but usually in musical numbers that could be edited out when the films were shown in the segregated South... In short films produced for black audiences, she radiated elegance and verve and showed the beginning of acting skills that deserved nurturing... She balked at taking acting roles that would call for her to be an empty-headed maid or mammy and so her screenwork was limited almost exclusively to singing parts... When World War II began, Lena became a fixture on the USO circuit... Her political calling led her to join [Paul] Robeson...in a campaign to improve employment practices in California during the early forties...For much of the next two decades Lena sang and performed in world-famous nightclubs and theaters around the globe, including sold-out tours that took her to London, New York, Chicago and Paris.

In the sixties, Lena emerged along with Harry Belafonte and Marlon Brando as the most visible performer-activists in America.. In the early eighties, Lena’s one-woman show on Broadway became legendary: The Lady and Her Music began as a limited engagement and became the longest running one-woman show in Broadway history... In the years that followed, Lena was “rediscovered” by performers and pop music fans alike. She received a Kennedy Center Honor, ASCAP awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the NAACP... Even after all the political activism and five decades of professional triumphs Lena was most happy as matriarch to a new generation of the strong-willed Horne clan... Lena spoke lovingly of her success as a “family blessing.” It was a fitting statement from a woman who, like the venerable civil rights organization she joined at age two, embodied the strength and grace of BLACK AMERICAN achievement in this century.”

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Excerpts from “Fifty Black Women Who Changed America”

Alexander, Amy “Fifty Black Women Who Changed America” New Jersey: Birch Lane Press, 1999:134