2025.0211.0002...

For Black History Month...

Lena Horne

"I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white peo­ple could accept," she once said.
"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."

In the 1940s, she was one of the first black per­formers hired to sing with a major white band, the first to play the Copa­cabana night­club and among a hand­ful with a Holly­wood contract.

In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century-Fox to play the role of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical "Stormy Weather." Her ren­di­tion of the title song became a major hit and her sig­na­ture piece.

But Horne was perpetually frustrated with the public humiliation of racism. While at MGM, she starred in the all-black "Cabin in the Sky," in 1943, but in most of her other movies, she appeared only in musical numbers that could be cut in the racially insensitive South without affecting the story. These included "I Dood It," a Red Skelton comedy, "Thou­sands Cheer" and "Swing Fever," all in 1943; "Broadway Rhythm" in 1944; and "Ziegfeld Follies" in 1946.

Later she embraced activism, breaking loose as a voice for civil rights and as an artist.
In the last decades of her life, she rode a new wave of popularity as a revered icon of American popular music.