"Long Live The Horne"

Earlier this week a legendary woman was called home and her name was Lena Horne. Long before Beyonce' there was Lena Horne men wanted to be with her while women wanted to be her. Born as Lena Mary Calhoun Horne in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City Reported to be descended from the John C. Calhoun family, both sides of her family were a mixture of African American, European American, and Native American descent and each belonged to what W. E. B. Du Bois called "The Talented Tenth," the upper stratum of middle-class, well-educated blacks.

It was evident that she was a talented Singer and Actress her most familiar work includes the following Meet Me in Las Vegas, Death of a Gunfighter, The Wiz, and countless other movie and television apperances. But there was so much more to her she allow me to elaborateHorne was long involved with the Civil Rights movement. In 1941, she sang at Cafe Society and worked with Paul Robeson. During World War II, when entertaining the troops for the USO, she refused to perform "for segregated audiences or for groups in which German POWs were seated in front of African American servicemen", according to her Kennedy Center biography. Since the US Army refused to allow integrated audiences, she wound up putting on a show for a mixed audience of black US soldiers and white German POWs.

She was at an NAACP rally with Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, the weekend before Evers was assassinated. She also met President John F. Kennedy at the White House two days before he was assassinated. She was at the March on Washington and spoke and performed on behalf of the NAACP, SNCC, and the National Council of Negro Women. She also worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to pass anti-lynching laws. Also a member of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.