The Legendary Miss Lena Horne

THE LEGENDARY MISS LENA HORNE traces Horne's fascinating life and career, which began on the road with her mother, an aspiring performer herself. Beginning with a job as a dancer at Harlem's famous Cotton Club, the fair-skinned and beautiful Horne was plucked off the chorus line and quickly became a Broadway sensation, a hit singer, and a bona fide movie star, earning the first studio contract offer from a film studio for a black actress. She refused to take the stereotypical and demeaning roles of "maids and mammies" typically reserved for women of color at the time. "They didn't make me into a maid, but they didn't make me into anything else either," Horne said. Being light-skinned caused her problems, too: "Lest Lena be mistaken on screen for white, Max Factor created makeup just to darken her skin. Then she lost roles to white actresses who wore her makeup to play light-skinned black women." Though racism and the fears of moviegoers in the South made it difficult to reach the career heights of her white peers, she built a solid body of work and appeared in such classic black films as Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. She was blacklisted during the Cold War, faced a backlash for her ethnic ambiguity, experienced the harsh realities of Jim Crow laws and persistent violence against people of color, and eventually became an active member of the civil rights movement. "In this battle, Lena was not just a pretty face," Weatherford writes, "But a foot soldier."