Lena Mary Calhoun Horne (June 30, 1917 – May 9, 2010) was an American dancer, actress, singer, and civil rights activist. Horne's career spanned more than seventy years, appearing in film, television, and theatre. Horne joined the chorus of the Cotton Club at the age of sixteen and became a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood.
Horne advocated for human rights and took part in the March on Washington in August 1963. Later she returned to her roots as a nightclub performer and continued to work on television while releasing well-received record albums. She announced her retirement in March 1980, but the next year starred in a one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, which ran for more than 300 performances on Broadway. She then toured the country in the show, earning numerous awards and accolades. Horne continued recording and performing sporadically into the 1990s, retreating from the public eye in 2000.
Early life
Lena Horne was born in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.[1] Both sides of her family were African American. She belonged to the well-educated, upper stratum of black New Yorkers at the time. She was reportedly descended from the John C. Calhoun family; his nephew, Dr Andrew Bonaparte Calhoun, "owned the slaves whose descendants include... Horne".[2][3]
Her father, Edwin Fletcher "Teddy" Horne Jr. (1893–1970),[4] at one-time owner of a hotel and restaurant,[5] was a gambler—he and "his partner, the gambler and philanthropist Gus Greenlee, owned the Belmont Hotel on Wylie Avenue and ran the numbers racket in the Hill" – who left the family when Lena was three years old and moved to an upper-middle-class African-American community in the Hill District community of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Lena came to live with him aged 18 until her marriage the next year.[6][7] Her mother, Edna Louise Scottron, was an actress with a black theatre troupe and traveled extensively.[8] Edna's maternal grandmother, Amelie Louise Ashton, was from modern Senegal.[9] Horne was raised mainly by her grandparents, Cora Calhoun and Edwin Horne.[4]
When Horne was five, she was sent to live in Georgia.[10] For several years, she traveled with her mother.[11] From 1927 to 1929, she lived with her uncle, Frank S. Horne. He was the Dean of students at Fort Valley Junior Industrial Institute (now part of Fort Valley State University) in Fort Valley, Georgia,[11] who later served as an adviser to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.[12] From Fort Valley, southwest of Macon, Horne briefly moved to Atlanta with her mother; they returned to New York when Horne was twelve years old, after which Horne attended St Peter Claver School in Brooklyn.[11]
She then attended Girls High School, an all-girls public high school in Brooklyn that has since become Boys and Girls High School; she dropped out without earning a diploma. At the age of 18, she moved to her father's home in Pittsburgh, staying in the city's Little Harlem for almost five years and learning music from native Pittsburghers Billy Strayhorn and Billy Eckstine, among others.
