Birth Name: Lena Mary Calhoun Horne
Birthplace: Brooklyn, NY
Born: 30-Jun-1917
Died: 9-May-2010
Location of death: Manhattan, NY
Race or Ethnicity: mixture of African American, European, and Native American descent
Source:
Profile: Fuzzybear
Celebrities sharing similar heritage:
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Hey, Lena was a Creole that chose to only acknowledge her African Heritage because she felt it was important for people to know she was Black and to love her as a Black. She sw the struggles and even went through some when she could have easily passed for Hispanic or White because she loved her Black heritage. (Not that sh didn’t love the rest but she felt that the Black part of her needed a strong fighter.)
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“Lena Horne’s parents were both very light in color and came from black upper-middle-class families in Brooklyn (Horne and Schickel, 1965; Buckley, 1986). Lena lived with her father’s parents until she was about seven years old. Her grandfather was very light and blue-eyed. Her fair-skinned grandmother was the daughter of a slave woman and her white owner, from the family of John C. Calhoun, well-known defender of slavery. One of her father’s great-grandmothers was a Blackfoot Indian, to whom Lena Horne has attributed her somewhat coppery skin color. One of her mother’s grandmothers was a French-speaking black woman from Senegal and never a slave. Her mother’s father was a “Portuguese Negro,” and two women in his family had passed as white and become entertainers.”
The Seventh Paragraph:
http://condor.depaul.edu/~mwilson/multicult/whois.html
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RIP Lena
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Beautiful Woman!
May You Rest In Peace!
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