End of an era - Singer, civil rights activist Lena Horne dies
She will be remembered as much for her songs and scenes as for the tireless activism against racism. She will be remembered also for paving the way for black actresses showcasing their histrionics in prominent roles in Hollywood movies.
Horne’s chiseled face, regal gait and overwhelming sex appeal was accepted in Hollywood with much ease. In fact, Horne had once said that she was a black person that white people found it easy to accept. “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,” she had said once.
She was criticized by black people for trying to pass through a white world unscathed because of her light complexion. In fact rumor has it that Max Factor even developed an “Egyptian” makeup shade especially for her while she was with MGM.
However, in his book “Gotta Sing Gotta Dance: A Pictorial History of Film Musicals,” John Kobal wrote that Horne refused comply with the studio’s efforts to portray her as an exotic latin American actress. “I don't have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I'd become,” Horne had once said. “I'm me, and I'm like nobody else.”
Horne’s major hit “Stormy Weather” became a cult song for the generation. Even today her name brings to mind the lyrics of the song where she sang, “Don't know why, there's no sun up in the sky, Stormy weather, since my man and I ain't together, Keeps rainin' all the time…”
Horne tasted success on the Broadway with “Jamaica” in 1957. Reviewer Richard Watts Jr. had then called her “one of the incomparable performers of our time.”
Despite her success, throughout her life Horne remained bothered about the racism that black people faced in a white world.
“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 had said in the book “I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America.”
In the 1960s, Horne was one of the most prominent celebrity civil rights activists. From throwing a lamp at a person who passed a racial comment in a Beverly Hills restaurant, to marching alongside 250,000 others in the March on Washington when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963, she was always at the forefront of the American civil rights movement.
She remained elusive till the day she died because she wanted to be a “woman the audience can't reach and therefore can't hurt.” When Halle Berry won the best actress Oscar in 2002, the first black woman to do so, she had said, “This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. ... It's for every nameless, faceless woman of color who now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.”
After her father, her son and her husband all died between 1970-71; a grief-stricken Horne isolated herself from the entire world. When finally a friend persuaded her to return she found herself to be less bitter. “I wouldn't trade my life for anything," she said, “because being black made me understand.”