Lena Horne, pioneering entertainer and civil rights activist, is dead

I’m almost embarrassed to disclose that I have only seen one Lena Horne movie: Stormy Weather – a 1943 musical based on the life and times of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson featuring many of the other top black entertainers of the day, including Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, and the Nicholas Brothers. 

Even worse, I do not own a single recording by this four-time Grammy-award winning singer; not even the eponymous song from the one movie I saw, which actually became her signature.

Instead, just as it was with my tribute to Eartha Kitt upon her death, this tribute to Horne stems solely from my appreciation for the pioneering steps she took for the advancement of black people.

I was particularly impressed by the fact that she utterly shunned the self-abnegating farce of “passing” for white during the Jim Crow period, which lasted from the 1880s to the 1960s, when so many other light-skinned blacks did. But her I’m-black-and-I’m-proud activism extended far beyond this act of affirmative self-identification. 

For Horne was a trailblazer for racial equality and integration all over the world long before it occurred to Rosa Parks in 1955 to stand up for black civil rights by sitting down in the white section of an Alabama bus.

She was often cited as a show business triple threat for being an accomplished singer, dancer, and actor, which earned her the pioneering distinction of becoming the first black to sign a long-term contract with a major Hollywood studio. But I suspect she’d rather be remembered for fighting with righteous indignation to integrate places of entertainment that coveted her talent but denied access to blacks.

I was always battling the system to try to get to be with my people. Finally, I wouldn’t work for places that kept us out. … It was a damn fight everywhere I was, every place I worked, in New York, in Hollywood, all over the world.

(Horne as quoted by photographer Brian Lanker in a collection entitled Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America.)

So instead of parroting accolades for her contributions to the arts, I pay this modest tribute for the profile in courage she showed as a civil rights pioneer. 

Horne died on Sunday in New York City. She was 92.

Farewell, Lena.

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