Remembering Lena Horne
By Shane Vogel
In May of 1963, US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy convened a meeting of black representatives from the realms of politics, academia, and the arts. The remarkable gathering included James Baldwin, Lena Horne, Lorraine Hansberry, Harry Belafonte, social psychologist Kenneth Clark, president of the Chicago Urban League Edwin Berry, and Jerome Smith, a young activist and CORE fieldworker. Concerned by the escalating protests in Birmingham, Kennedy hoped to persuade these race leaders to publicly diffuse mass anger and counsel patience. Kennedy offered defensive platitudes of his record on civil rights; Clark, Hansberry, and others tried to impress upon him the inadequacy of the federal response to the situation in the south. Both sides spoke past each other until the meeting was brought to a halt by the soft-spoken yet passionate interruption of Jerome Smith. Smith challenged Kennedy's pragmatic politics. Speaking of his experience registering black voters in Louisiana and Mississippi, he cut through the figures, policies, and statistics under discussion with a visceral description of what the struggle in the south was like.
Looking back, Horne described her response to Smith's testimony as a simultaneous solidarity with and isolation from his struggle. "You could not encompass his anger, his fury, in a set of statistics," she recalled, "nor could Mr. Belafonte and Dr. Clark and Miss Horne, the fortunate Negroes, who had never been in a Southern jail, keep up the pretense of being the mature, responsible spokesmen for the race anymore. All of the sudden the fancy phrases like 'depressed area' and 'power structure' and all the rest were nothing. It seemed to me that this boy just put it like it was." The fundamental dynamics of this confrontation--between black and white, north and south, urban and rural, social science and the arts, elite and mass politics, younger and older generations--can be heard in every song that Lena Horne recorded throughout her career.
I thought of this scene when I heard the news that Lena Horne passed away on May 9, 2010. Horne, as much as Kennedy, got schooled in that meeting, and her account of Smith's oration suggests what we, in turn, might learn from Lena. In her writings, recordings, and performances we can discern a deep pedagogical impulse that undermines hierarchical models of knowledge transmission and instructs us in new ways to listen--something Horne models for us in her account of Kennedy's meeting and that she demands of us every time we listen to her sing. Through her vocal stylization, her comportment toward her song and her audience, Horne created a space that allowed for new possibilities of self-knowledge and social reassemblage. Within this space, Horne contemplated her own location within history and continually worked to dismantle the logic of the "firsts" that underwrote her career.
Read the Full Text @ Social Text
***
Shane Vogel is associate professor of English at Indiana University. He is the author of The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (University of Chicago Press, 2009).
By Shane Vogel
In May of 1963, US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy convened a meeting of black representatives from the realms of politics, academia, and the arts. The remarkable gathering included James Baldwin, Lena Horne, Lorraine Hansberry, Harry Belafonte, social psychologist Kenneth Clark, president of the Chicago Urban League Edwin Berry, and Jerome Smith, a young activist and CORE fieldworker. Concerned by the escalating protests in Birmingham, Kennedy hoped to persuade these race leaders to publicly diffuse mass anger and counsel patience. Kennedy offered defensive platitudes of his record on civil rights; Clark, Hansberry, and others tried to impress upon him the inadequacy of the federal response to the situation in the south. Both sides spoke past each other until the meeting was brought to a halt by the soft-spoken yet passionate interruption of Jerome Smith. Smith challenged Kennedy's pragmatic politics. Speaking of his experience registering black voters in Louisiana and Mississippi, he cut through the figures, policies, and statistics under discussion with a visceral description of what the struggle in the south was like.
Looking back, Horne described her response to Smith's testimony as a simultaneous solidarity with and isolation from his struggle. "You could not encompass his anger, his fury, in a set of statistics," she recalled, "nor could Mr. Belafonte and Dr. Clark and Miss Horne, the fortunate Negroes, who had never been in a Southern jail, keep up the pretense of being the mature, responsible spokesmen for the race anymore. All of the sudden the fancy phrases like 'depressed area' and 'power structure' and all the rest were nothing. It seemed to me that this boy just put it like it was." The fundamental dynamics of this confrontation--between black and white, north and south, urban and rural, social science and the arts, elite and mass politics, younger and older generations--can be heard in every song that Lena Horne recorded throughout her career.
I thought of this scene when I heard the news that Lena Horne passed away on May 9, 2010. Horne, as much as Kennedy, got schooled in that meeting, and her account of Smith's oration suggests what we, in turn, might learn from Lena. In her writings, recordings, and performances we can discern a deep pedagogical impulse that undermines hierarchical models of knowledge transmission and instructs us in new ways to listen--something Horne models for us in her account of Kennedy's meeting and that she demands of us every time we listen to her sing. Through her vocal stylization, her comportment toward her song and her audience, Horne created a space that allowed for new possibilities of self-knowledge and social reassemblage. Within this space, Horne contemplated her own location within history and continually worked to dismantle the logic of the "firsts" that underwrote her career.
Read the Full Text @ Social Text
***
Shane Vogel is associate professor of English at Indiana University. He is the author of The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (University of Chicago Press, 2009).
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