Lena Horne Research Paper

Lena Horne was an African American entertainer and civil rights activist, born in Brooklyn, New York. She, like many other African Americans in general, and African American women in particular, born in 1910’s, saw many evolutions of race and racialized gender relations in America. She was able to transition to glory at the ripe age of 92 years old, passing away from congestive heart failure in 2010. Lena Horne’s height of her career, while predating Womanism being named but not actualized, embodies the four tenets that are, radical subjectivity, critical engagement, redemptive self-love and traditional communalism, by way of her commitments to hope in perilous times. She is quoted saying many things that will be highlighted in this paper,

but to start I would like to offer this one, in particular, to center with.
“It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it.”
In this final paper, I would like to examine Lena Horne’s epistemological ways of knowing hope, grounded in the contemporary womanism methodological approach to how hope functions in the face of cultural and personal crisis that may lead to a revelation for today in these 45 presidential times.

Background:
Lena Horne was born to first generation free parents in 1917 but was raised by her ex-slave maternal grandmother for quite some time.

While she was of mixed descent and fair hue of skin, this did not shield her from the social realities of her time. As a high school dropout, Lena Horne needed to help her family and realized that she had an amazing voice that would provide for her and her loved ones. However, providing was not enough, she decided to cultivate an ethic around her production of gift that would challenge society's status quo, racism and racialized sexism.
At 16 years old, Horne joined the chorus of the Cotton Club and became a nightclub performer before moving to Hollywood. Lena Horne is most well known for her roles in the musical films, Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. She reflected on this time with saying “In every other film I just sang a song or two; the scenes could be cut out when they were sent to local distributors in the South. Unfortunately, I didn’t get much of a chance to act, Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather were the only movies in which I played a character who was involved in the plot.” She also played in many television shows all while releasing numerous albums. The most meaningful role Lena Horne played in my childhood was in The Wiz singing Believe in Yourself. Lena Horne was awarded four of seven Grammy

nominations.
Lena Horne did not allow systems, institutions and isms of the modern day silence her voice or stop the productivity of agency. This is the breeding ground for actualized hope. She took in the world around in a way that was reflective but did not internalize or equate it to be her ontological value. She pushed underprivileged communities to see “you have to be taught to be second class; you're not born that way.” The art of seeing divine value in those deemed the least of these, was how she functioned in the depths of despair gripping to the coat-tail of hope.

Despair:
This semester, we have grappled with defining despair concretely but the biggest take away was seeing that despair is always present when life changes radically and negatively. For example, in Radical hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, a huge change was when there was no more buffalo. Despair being present does not mean that it is decapitating, only if it is being addressed can it be overcome. This was demonstrated by the Crow tribe led by Plenty Coup to adjust to the new conditions in a way that would sustain their lives.
Despair was real for Lena Horne as well. She experienced the saddest of tragedies, like losing her son, father, and brother not too far apart in 1970-1971. She disappeared for a while but would come back and grace the television screens and record again. Horne believed that you must truly feel each and every emotion as proof that you were still alive and thus had the capacity to do something, constructive for change. Hence, why she offered “don't be afraid to feel as angry or as loving as you can, because when you feel nothing, it's just death.” Her wisdom birthed out of despair, led her to fully understand the opportunity that living has to offer and what could be seen as a sacrificial offering to those that passed before us.
Another mode of despair Lena Horne experienced was in her professional career.

Lena Horne was blacklisted from Hollywood due to her activism and ideological affiliations, which had little bearings if at all, on any her contacts with recording labels. She describes her time blacklisted “I told them I belong to the same organizations and clubs Mrs. Roosevelt belongs to, but with a few brave exceptions, I was still unable to do films or television for the next seven years.” Much of her being blacklisted is attributed to her well known friendship, Paul Robeson, an African American Bass player heavily involved with social justice movements. Unlike many others, Horne’s great fame could not shield her. It was the means in which they attacked her professionally and personally. Her civil rights activism and friendship with Robeson and others marked her as a Communist sympathizer which was seen as professional

suicide.
Like many politically active artists of color during this time, Horne found herself blacklisted and unable to perform on television or in the movies which was her love. For seven years the attacks on her person and political beliefs continued. During this time, however, Horne could still work as a singer. She made appearances in nightclubs and created some of her best recordings in her life. For example, Lena Horne at the Waldorf Astoria was recorded in 1957, and is still considered to be one of her best today. Though the conservative atmosphere of the 1950s took its toll on Horne, by the 1960s she had returned to the public eye and was a major cultural figure once again but all in all stayed true to herself and her beliefs.

Hope:
Hope for Lena Horne wasn’t waiting on a different tomorrow to come but doing something with the moment she had. I think this is what I was able to conclude from this semester when trying to define hope. The act of doing something in the hardest moments in life is exuding hope, period. While we engaged in the hamster wheel of trying to definitively attribute value to certain actions as more or less hope-filled, Horne demonstrates the pure beauty in choosing to respond in action immediately.
In Agents of Hope: A Pastoral Psychology by Donald Capps he offers that hope looks like movement, the act of reaching out to a pastor is seeking hope, and pastors reaching out is offering hope. Now in this book Capps points out how hope is important to living daily and how pastors can ensure that members have the necessary help that they need to survive in a state of hopelessness, as “hope is the very heart and soul of the religious view of life and world.”
I believe that Horne would agree with Capps but push him to see that as our mission as humans, in general. While there was little published on her religious affiliations, she took serious a commission of sort of her life and the responsibility of it in relation to others. She does credits her development to Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “Malcolm X raised my consciousness about myself and my people and other people more than any person I know.”
A few examples of how Lena Horne embodied hope and inspired it can be seen concretely during the Second World War, when entertaining the troops for the USO. Lena Horne refused to perform "for segregated audiences or for groups in which German prisoners of war were seated in front of African American servicemen." The U.S. Army refused to allow integrated audiences, so she staged her show for a mixed audience of black U.S. soldiers and white German prisoners of war. Seeing the black soldiers had been forced to sit in the back seats, behind prisoners of war, she walked off the stage to the first row where the black troops were seated and performed with the Germans behind her.
Imagine being a black soldier who has committed his life to his country overseas fighting a war and captured prisoners of war are able to sit in front of you at a show. This is asinine. While this may have been the protocol, Lena Horne quickly moved into action. I am not sure how the black soldiers felt when she moved to perform in front of them but I can only assume that this was hope inducing.
During this period, another way Lena Horne pushed against despair was by refusing to play certain roles in films. African-American actors were mostly limited to playing servants or African natives. Lena Horne refused to play roles that represented African-Americans disrespectfully. This definitely had its own set of challenges since this was the way that she provided for her and her family’s livelihood but she knew the value of herself and refused to even play a fictional character that was not in conjunction with her divine and ontological value.
In regards to the Hope without Optimism text, Terry Eagleton argues that hope needs to be logical, calculated and even assurance. While I argued against this approach in the last book reflection, I do not think that this would be far off of what Lena Horne saw herself doing when reacting. Lena Horne brings to light the embodied aspect, I argued Eagleton’s was missing all while showing how calculated her actions were to reinforce Eagleton’s approach to hope.