Lena Horne ......

Singer and actress Lena Horne dies at 92 (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Over her dazzling five-decade career, Lena Horne soared from Cotton Club showgirl to the screen's "bronze bombshell" to one of Broadway's grandest dames. She made her remarkable flight while toting the expectations of two races on a thrush's fragile wings.  The 92-year-old actress, activist, and vocalist, honored with Grammys, a Tony, and the NAACP's highest award, died Sunday night at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. The cause of death was not disclosed.  In 1943, when she made her name in the Hollywood musicals Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, Miss Horne became the first African American movie star. Studio moguls worried that the 26-year-old singer might be too exotic for the white public. By 1963, black-pride leaders thought her too assimilationist.  It is a measure of the glacially self-contained performer that she prevailed despite stormy weather from both sides. She used her experience in Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, a 1981 one-woman Broadway show, to sing the history of the civil rights movement, over two hours thawing from iceberg to roaring river. She won a Tony Award for a triumph that was both social statement and coup de théâtre.

Lena Calhoun Horne was born June 30, 1917, in Brooklyn, N.Y. One of nature's flawless creations, she embodied the contradictions and confluences of race in the United States. Among her forebears were both slaves and a vocal proponent of slavery, Vice President John C. Calhoun. The black descendants of Calhoun traced their ancestry to Senegal; the Hornes were descended from British adventurers, American Indians, and freed slaves.  Miss Horne's paternal grandparents, Edwin and Cora, bought a brownstone in Brooklyn in the 1890s. Edwin was a teacher and political lobbyist, Cora a suffragist and founding member of the NAACP. - (complete obituary)