💁🏾‍♀️(Submitted by Nzingha H. ’20)

 🌟Attended Booker T. Washington Junior High School in the seventh grade before returning to New York.
🌟With a career spanning over 70 years, Horne:
🌟Began performing at the Cotton Club in Harlem in 1933 at the age of 16. 🌟Made her Broadway debut in 1934 🌟From 1935 to 1936, she was the principal vocalist with the all-black Noble Sissle Society Orchestra. 🌟Became one of the first African Americans to cross the music-business color divide and tour with an all-white band.
🌟Horne made her Hollywood nightclub debut in January 1942. A few weeks later, she was signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
🌟She appeared in a number of MGM musicals, in such films as Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, but was never featured in a leading role because of her race and the fact that her films had to be re-edited for showing in cities where theaters would not show films with black performers.
🌟In the early, 1940s, Horne was the highest-paid black entertainer
🌟Horne was actively engaged in the Civil Rights Movement, performing at rallies around the country on behalf of the NAACP and the National Council for Negro Women, and she participated in the 1963 March on Washington.
🌟In 1981, performed an autobiographical one-woman show, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, opened on Broadway, ran for over a year and then toured internationally.” It brought her a raft of prizes, including a Tony award and two Grammys. 🌟Horne’s filmography includes: * Cabin in the Sky (1943)
* Stormy Weather (1943)
* Thousands Cheer (1943)
* I Dood It (1943)
* Swing Fever (1943)
* Boogie-Woogie Dream (1944) (short subject; filmed in 1941)
* Broadway Rhythm (1944)
* Two Girls and a Sailor (1944)
* The Wiz (1978)
* The Cosby Show (1985)
* A Different World (1993)
* Sesame Street (1973)
#forBTWbyBTW #BHM2020 #blackexcellence
Source: Biography.com, The Guardian
Video: Broadway Rhythm (1944) and Words and Music (1948)