Hollywood filmed Lena Horne's songs so they could be cut out in the South
MGM signed Lena Horne in 1942 but would not give her lead roles. Her numbers were shot as self-contained scenes, so theatres in cities that refused to show Black performers could snip them out without breaking the plot. She turned that sidelining into a seventy-year career and a life of civil rights activism.
Horne was born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, on June 30, 1917, into the educated upper tier of Black New York. Her father, a gambler who had once owned a hotel, left when she was three; her mother toured with a Black theatre company, so her paternal grandparents did much of the raising. A childhood spent moving included two years in Fort Valley, Georgia, with an uncle who later advised Franklin Roosevelt. She dropped out of high school at 16.
That same autumn of 1933 she joined the chorus at Harlem's Cotton Club, where Black artists performed for white-only audiences, and the star Adelaide Hall took her under her wing. She toured and first recorded with Noble Sissle's orchestra, sang at Café Society in New York and spent time in Pittsburgh learning from Billy Strayhorn and Billy Eckstine. A Sunset Strip nightclub debut in January 1942 led, within weeks, to her MGM contract.
At MGM she debuted in Panama Hattie and appeared in Cabin in the Sky, which had an all-Black cast; one number, sung in a bubble bath, was cut by censors as too suggestive and resurfaced decades later in That's Entertainment! III. On loan to Fox she sang the title song of Stormy Weather, loosely based on Hall's life. She also became the first African American elected to the Screen Actors Guild board.
Horne marched in the March on Washington in August 1963, then returned to nightclubs, television and acclaimed albums. She announced her retirement in March 1980, only to open a one-woman Broadway show about her life in music the following year. It played more than 300 times before touring the country to many awards. She kept performing now and then into the 1990s, withdrew from public life in 2000 and died on May 9, 2010.
Source: Lena Horne
