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Last Updated: Jul 12th, 2010 - 17:21:06 |
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| Lena Horne |
The pioneering singer and actor Lena Horne has died at the age of 92. Lena Horne enjoyed a six-decade singing career on stage, television and in film. She was the first black woman to be signed to a long-term contract by a major Hollywood studio. She helped break racial boundaries by acting alongside white entertainers, but she was segregated on screen so producers could clip out her singing when the movies ran in the South. In the 1950s, she was blacklisted in part because of her friendship with Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1963, Lena Horne took part in the March on Washington alongside Harry Belafonte and Dick Gregory and was part of a group, which included authors James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry, that met with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to urge a more active approach to desegregation. Here are excerpts from a rare 1966 interview with Lena Horne from the Pacifica Radio Archives. She was interviewed by Gene DeAlessi at the San Francisco Fairmont Hotel. He first asked her to talk about her father.
LENA HORNE: My father was a Negro man who, to survive, hustled. And in this sense of hustling and a Negro man, it means that oftentimes if you are educated and able to get a job, the most menial�and that was all you had the opportunity to�a job you had to hold�you didn�t want to do that. And you didn�t want to work for someone who had less talent, less brains, than you. So you risked your life; you laid your life down on the line. You were a hustler. You worked with, in many times, criminal attitudes. It took a lot of guts. And on the one hand, you chose that, rather than have �The Man� make a slave out of you.
GENE DEALESSI: Who is �The Man�?
LENA HORNE: I knew as soon as I said that, I shouldn�t have, without explaining it. The Man is the employer. And The Man, who was unusually the employer that offered the Negro man either the right to be a hustler or work for him, was usually a White man, a White employer.
GENE DEALESSI: And this spring-like day in 1966, that patois, The Man�
LENA HORNE: Yes.
GENE DEALESSI: �continues.
LENA HORNE: Still continues, of course. The Man is a sheriff in Mississippi. The Man is a cop in Harlem, White.
GENE DEALESSI: Could he be Negro?
LENA HORNE: He could be Negro, because even though he�s Negro, The Man who�s the head of his police department is the White man.
In this section of the interview, Gene DeAlessi is asking Lena Horne to talk about her relationship with Paul Robeson.
LENA HORNE: Paul taught me about being proud because I was Negro. I had always had this pride, this fierce, sterile, almost, kind of pride, because my grandmother had said, �You must be proud.� But she never told me all the horror of her background. One didn�t talk about it, you see. And then she died. And I was getting more and more in that middle-class trap with Negroes who might have a job, who didn�t speak about it also. I worked even at the time I was sixteen and with Sissle, with organizations, but he never told me the reasons why I had a right to some of that pride, you see.
But Paul is the first one who came to me and said, �Your grandmother was a fiery little woman who chased me off the street corners of Harlem.� And she was this, and she was that. I said, �Really? Nobody ever told me that.� He said, �Why, she was a wonderful Negro woman, because she wanted to help her people, and she felt she had a right to it. And she made this expression, noblesse oblige, mean being proud of her people.� And I said, �But nobody ever said it.�
And he sat down for hours, and he told me about Negro people and what�you know, I�ve read it in some books and never learned it in school; they don�t teach it in history books. I couldn�t know anything unless I really had moved up by then from the South and had been with Negro people who were terrified, you know, and couldn�t do anything about it. And he didn�t talk to me as a symbol of a pretty Negro chick singing in a club. He talked to me about my heritage. And that�s why I was always loved him. And I didn�t even know�he didn�t even speak to me as a leader, quote �Negro leader.�
And so, I grew to think then about all the�all the areas of it. And Josh taught me about singing about it. And I couldn�t sing, you know. And I was fighting that kind of inverse chauvinism from white people who said, �Ah, she can�t sing the blues,� you know. And so I felt embarrassed. But, by 1966, I find more and more myself calling upon the things that Paul said to me, because it�s as of now, except he is not our leader. We eat up our leaders, you know. We�history eats our leaders up. We eat them up. We drain them. And we throw them out because everything moves so fast. But I don�t think I could have felt the kind of pain I did and the kind of sense of recognition, when I saw Alabama and hoses and dogs and children, if I hadn�t had Paul in my life��
Click here to listen to the FULL interview and to also hear some of her music.
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