Goodbye to an Icon............

Singer, actress and civil-rights icon Lena Horne died on Sunday night in New York at the age of 92 of undisclosed causes. The jazz icon, whose signature song was "Stormy Weather," famously fought racist attitudes in Hollywood in her efforts to become the first black leading lady on the big screen. She died at New York-Presbyterian/ Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan, according to The New York Times.



She became the top-earning black performer in Hollywood by 1945, playing lucrative nightclub gigs and gaining popularity among both white and black G.I.'s during World War II, who often kept pictures of her in their footlockers. While doing U.S.O. tours, she openly criticized the treatment of black troops, which earned her a rebuke from the organization. She secretly married white arranger/conductor Lennie Hayton in 1947, and she claimed that the combination of her U.S.O. comments and friendships with such left-leaning civil-rights figures as singer Paul Robeson got her blacklisted in Hollywood, preventing her from working for nearly a decade after her MGM contract lapsed in 1950.


In addition to two Grammy awards, she won a special Tony Award for her 1981 one-woman Broadway show, "Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music," and continued to release albums into the 1990s and tour extensively in Europe and North America.