Lena Horne

As a Black entertainer during the period of racial segregation she achieved several firsts. These included being the first Black entertainer to sing with a white band, the first to perform at the then famous Copacabana nightclub in New York, and the first Black entertainer to be contracted by a major movie studio, MGM in 1942. In 1943, MGM Studios sub-contracted her to another studio, 20th Century-Fox, to star in the all-Black musical Stormy Weather. Her rendition of the title song, “Stormy Weather” became a national hit and her most famous song to this day.

Horne was also a civil rights activist. She said in various interviews that she was aware that her beauty (especially her light skin and finely chiseled face) and sex appeal made her more acceptable to whites, than most other Black entertainers of the time. However, although whites accepted her as an entertainer in clubs and movies, she still could not mix with them socially. She once said, “I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked.”

In a book on her life and career, she said she was perpetually frustrated with the public humiliation of racism, and was always battling the system to try to get to be with her people, and finally wouldn't work for places that kept out Blacks. In the book, I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America she said, “It was a damn fight everywhere I was, every place I worked, in New York, in Hollywood, all over the world.”

A young Lena Horne

Her movies at MGM included Cabin in the Sky and Thousands Cheer in 1943, and the popular Ziegfeld Follies in 1946. However, she felt the sting of racism in 1951 when she was overlooked for the white actress Ava Gardener to star in the movie, Show Boat. The oversight made her more aggressive in seeking civil rights for Blacks.

In 1978 she starred as Gilda the good witch in the movie The Wiz with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson.

She continued to perform in night clubs for years, and with great acclaim for her Las Vegas act, The Lady and Her Music. Still performing well into her 60s she won a Tony award at age 64 in 1981 for her one-woman Broadway show, Lena Horne: The Lady and her Music.

Lena Horne is survived by daughter Gail Lumet Buckley. She was pre-deceased in the early 1970s by a son and her husband, arranger/conductor Lennie Hayton.