Lena Horne, 1917-2010

[tonysam]

Good piece in the WSWS:

Lena Horne’s death in a New York City hospital last Sunday, less than two months shy of her 93rd birthday, is an occasion not only to review her remarkable 65-year show business career, but also to consider briefly the conditions during which that career unfolded.

The span of her life is itself significant. Born June 30, 1917, two months after US entry into World War I and four months before the Russian Revolution, Horne lived through the Depression, the Second World War, the birth of the Cold War, the eruption of the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union and countless other major historical episodes.

How and to what extent these events helped shape her life and career are complex questions, but her status as a social personality—perhaps the almost inevitable fate of an outspoken African-American entertainer at the time—makes them unavoidable ones. Individuality does not consist in a human being’s independence from social processes and experiences, but in how those various processes and experiences find a unique expression.

Undoubtedly, the emergence of a mass movement for civil rights in the US in the middle of the last century, against both the Jim Crow segregation of the South and more subtle forms of anti-black racism in the North, was central to Lena Horne’s life and experience. In its best aspects, Horne’s career embodied the struggle for equality.

Much more