Lena Horne

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born in Brooklyn on the thirtieth of June 1917, the daughter of two well-educated upper-middle-class Black parents — both descendants of free Black families documented in the antebellum North. She made her first stage appearance at the Cotton Club in Harlem at sixteen, joined the touring company of the Charlie Barnet Orchestra at nineteen — one of the first Black women to sing with a white orchestra — and signed her seven-year MGM contract in 1942 at twenty-five.

The contract was the first long-term Hollywood studio contract awarded to an African American, and its terms were negotiated against MGM's standard practice for Black performers. Horne was permitted to refuse demeaning roles. She accepted only those parts in which she could appear as herself — singing — rather than as a maid, mammy, or comic relief. The arrangement set a precedent that took the studio system thirty years to fully internalize.

Her sustained civil-rights advocacy began in the same period. She refused to perform for segregated military audiences during the Second World War; she conducted personally arranged USO tours for Black troops. She joined the 1963 March on Washington and was a personal friend and political colleague of Paul Robeson — also placed in this archive — through the period when both were targets of FBI surveillance and McCarthy-era blacklisting.

Her 1981 Broadway solo show Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music ran for three hundred and thirty-three performances, won a special Tony Award, and was the longest-running solo show by a woman in Broadway history at the time of its closing.

She died in New York on the ninth of May 2010, age ninety-two.

She is honored here as the singer who refused the maid's apron and rewrote the studio contract.