Lena Horne

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born on June 30, 1917, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York, into one of Black America's most distinguished families. Though the household was cultured and educated — her paternal grandmother, Cora Calhoun Horne, an Atlanta-born suffragist and early NAACP member, enrolled young Lena in the NAACP at age two — its bourgeois standing was rooted in the American South. Her great-grandfather Moses Calhoun had been an enslaved house butler in Georgia who, after emancipation, built a grocery, restaurant, and boardinghouse to join Atlanta's Black middle class. Raised largely by these grandparents, Lena inherited both refinement and a conscience.

She joined the chorus of Harlem's Cotton Club at sixteen, then rose through the nightclub circuit to Broadway and Hollywood. In 1942 she became one of the first African Americans to sign a long-term contract with a major studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Yet she refused roles that demeaned Black women, and studios often filmed her in stand-alone numbers that could be cut for Southern theaters. Her incandescent performance of "Stormy Weather" in the 1943 film made the song hers for life.

Horne wielded her fame as a weapon for justice. She refused to perform for segregated military audiences during World War II, marched on Washington in 1963, and was blacklisted in the 1950s for her progressive views and her friendship with Paul Robeson. Her honors came to include the NAACP Spingarn Medal, Kennedy Center Honors, a special Tony Award, and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

She died in New York City on May 9, 2010, at ninety-two. Lena Horne carried beauty, defiance, and dignity through more than seventy years of American life — and never once let the world make her smaller than she was.