Lena Horne (06/30/1917 – 05/09/2010) Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was a Twentieth-century, African American singer and actress. She famously sang Stormy Weather, won a Grammy Award for a 1981 album entitled Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, and appeared in film versions of The Wiz, Broadway Rhythm, and Ziegfeld Follies. She was born in New York City to an affluent family of European, African-American, and Native American heritage. After dropping out of high school at the age of sixteen, she performed in the chorus of Harlems famed Cotton Club. The Cotton Club thought her light skin and “good hair” would be more appealing to white customers. As a civil rights activist with leftist political leanings, she was blacklisted in Hollywood during the McCarthy era. She refused to play roles that stereotyped African-American women. She was married to Louis Jordan Jones from 1937 to 1944; the couple had two children. She married Lennie Hayton, a white bandleader, in 1947, but they kept their marriage a secret for three years. They separated in the 1960s but never divorced. People tend to think only the South was once racially segregated, but that’s not the case. During a tour stop in Las Vegas, a hotel Horne stayed at reportedly burned the sheets she used after she checked out–rather than reuse them for white hotel guests. Lena Horne quote: “I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept. I was their daydream. 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.”
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 11:31:01 +0000
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