The passing of the amazing Lena Horne was marked by clips from her shows, interviews, and the reminder of her stature in the breakthrough capacity to enter a segregated industry with her beauty and her voice. Her version of 'Stormy Weather' is always a joy to hear.

Eugene Robinson in today's NY Times:

MGM cast her in a series of musicals, showcasing not just her voice but her beauty and sophistication. But the studio made sure that her scenes could be easily scissored out of prints of the movies that were destined for theaters in the South, where audiences would not have accepted a black actor as anything but a servant or a savage. Meanwhile, Horne was envied and even resented by other black actors in Hollywood who had to play servants and savages to get any work at all.

"They didn't make me into a maid, but they didn't make me anything else, either," Horne wrote in her autobiography. "I became a butterfly pinned to a column, singing away in Movieland."

Horne was always outspoken about civil rights. During World War II, she complained about how black soldiers -- who had made her a popular pinup, essentially the black Betty Grable -- were being treated in the segregated Army. Her refusal to perform for segregated audiences got her disinvited from USO tours.

Horne blamed her activism and her associations for the waning of her movie career after her MGM contract expired in 1950; actor Paul Robeson and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, both known for their left-leaning views, were among her good friends. There is no evidence that she was ever actually blacklisted, however. Tastes changed, and musicals became passe. By the time black actors began to get substantial dramatic roles in the movies, Horne was past leading-lady age.

She wasn't a great singer like Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan. Hattie McDaniel and Dorothy Dandridge were better actors. But Lena Horne was a much more important figure in American social history, because she was able to bridge the gap between black and white in a way that others could not. She could be vocal, even strident in her advocacy for civil rights; she could be a proud black woman who stood up for African American causes and refused to back down. But she could do all of this without ever seeming alienated.

She would come on Ed Sullivan's show and sing "Stormy Weather," and she would own the stage -- a glamorous, elegant revolutionary who helped change the way American eyes perceived black and white.