Lena Horne was a trailblazer of many firsts- she was the first black woman to sign a major contract with a Hollywood studio, play the Copacabana and sign with a major white band in the late 1930′s. Her success came not solely from her great talent, for surely there were many other black singers with talent, but from her beauty which was considered to “pass” for white enough as not to threaten or alienate white audiences. Horne accepted this threshold of a place in history and helped to open the doors for other black actors. She was featured primarily in “race films” which were the first movies where black actors had leading roles on the screen other than maids or servants. For the more mainstream films, her parts would be musical numbers with no speaking roles so that she could be easily cut out for distribution in the South. It was rumored that she was the favorite choice for the lead in the 1951 movie musical Showboat but instead the part went to Ava Gardner, who couldn’t even sing.

After being asked to sing for segregated troops, Horne refused, which got her kicked off the USO circuit and turned her into an outspoken civil-rights advocate. She marched on Washington, she spoke at a rally with Medgar Evers, she worked with Eleanor Roosevelt on anti-lynching campaigns, she worked for the NAACP, the SNCC and the National Council of Negro Women. Even after being accused of being a communist and supposedly blacklisted from Hollywood, she didn’t go away. She had a long nightclub career, won four Grammys, did a ton of television apperances and had a one-woman Broadway show in her sixties. She was also, as I remember very well but may need to Netflix again, Glinda the Good Witch in The Wiz. She recorded music up until 2000, at the age of 82. Lena Horne was a true American icon and a pretty classy woman who held her high up through extreme adversity.

“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,” she said, “I wouldn’t trade my life for anything, because being black made me understand.”