Legendary Actress Lena Horne Exits our stage at age 92 – Cornwall Ontario – May 10, 2010

Cornwall ON – Legendary Actress Lena Horne has passed away at the age of 92.     A break through actress and human being Ms Horne was  thanked by Halle Berry, who’ll probably play her one day in a movie, as a beacon that paved the way to  her being chosen the first African American Best Actress at the Oscars.

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Lena Mary Calhoun Horne, the great-granddaughter of a freed slave, was born in Brooklyn June 30, 1917, to a leading family in the black bourgeoisie. Her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her 1986 bookThe Hornes: An American Family that among their relatives was a college girlfriend of W.E.B. Du Bois and a black adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in the civil rights movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who made a racial slur in a Beverly Hills restaurant and in 1963 joining 250,000 others in the March on Washington when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Horne also spoke at a rally that same year with another civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, just days before his assassination.

What a rich and wonderful life Ms Horne had in spite of racism and the challenges she faced.  Here is a clip of one of her most famous renditions; Stormy Weather.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCG3kJtQBKo&feature=player_embedded

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