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Excerpt from the Guardian UK: here.
Lena Horne, black singer and activist, dies
Actor and singer who broke down racial barriers in film and music industries dies, aged 92
Lena Horne, the singer and actor best known for her rendition of Stormy Weather and as Hollywood’s first black sex symbol, has died. She was 92.
In a 60-year career, Horne broke down numerous racial barriers. In the 1940s, she was one of the first black singers with a major white band, the first to perform at the famous Copacabana nightclub, and the first to sign a long-term Hollywood contract.
She later became an active campaigner for civil rights and was a powerful voice of the movement…
Her 1981 one-woman Broadway show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, won a special Tony award.
By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in the civil rights movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who made a racial slur in a Beverly Hills restaurant. In 1963 she joined 250,000 others in the march on Washington when Martin Luther King gave his I Have a Dream speech. Horne spoke at a rally that same year with another civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, just days before his assassination.
Filed under: News Tagged: | black history, civil rights, Jazz, Lena Horne, Medgar Evers, obituary, racial issues
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