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“Meet the Real Lena Horne”: Representations of Lena Horne in Ebony Magazine, 1945–1949

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2009

MEGAN E. WILLIAMS
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Abstract

Following World War II, Ebony's creator and editor, John H. Johnson, sought to create a popular black magazine in the vein of Life and Look that would reflect the accomplishments and joys, “the happier side,” of African American life.1 Throughout the first four years of its publication, Lena Horne appeared on the magazine's cover three times – the only woman to do so during this period. In this paper, I argue that the fledgling Ebony magazine drew on Lena Horne's wartime status as a beautiful black icon and represented her as a symbol of its ideological project, broadly, and as the Ebony image of postwar black womanhood, specifically. The magazine's representation of Lena Horne acts as a useful trope for understanding how Ebony imaged postwar black femininity in terms of motherhood, work, and civil rights activism; additionally, Ebony's representation of Horne and Ebony readers' letters to the editor reveal central issues of respectability, pinup photography, colorism, hair care, and interracial relationships as they were debated within the magazine's pages.

Behind the lavish make-up, gay tinsel and brilliant glitter of American's most popular Negro entertainer, Lena Horne is a wonderfully human, somewhat lonesome, amazingly-honest, militant-minded personality who is relatively unknown to a vast audience of millions of movie, radio, and night club fans.2

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , April 2009 , pp. 117 - 130
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press

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References

1 From the first Ebony editorial quoted in John H. Johnson and Lerone Bennett Jr., Succeeding against the Odds (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 160.

2 “Meet the Real Lena Horne,” Ebony, Nov. 1947, 9.

3 “Backstage,” Ebony, Nov. 1945, 2.

4 “Cover,” Ebony, March 1946, 2.

5 Johnson and Bennett, 162.

6 Lena Horne appeared on the March 1946, Nov. 1947, and Oct. 1949 (with Duke Ellington) covers of Ebony.

7 In Heavenly Bodies Richard Dyer asks of the Jim Crow period, and of the similar popularity of African American actor Paul Robeson, a friend and mentor of Horne, “How did [this] period permit black stardom? … What was the fit between the parameters of what black images the society could tolerate and the particular qualities Robeson could be taken to embody?” See Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: Routledge, 2004), 65. Also see Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997), 254.

8 See Megan E. Williams, “Imaging Lena Horne: Race and Representation in 1940s America” (MA thesis, University of Kansas, 2006).

9 See my article “The Crisis Cover Girl: Lena Horne, the NAACP, and Representations of African American Femininity, 1941–1945,” American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography, 16, 2 (2006), 200–18.

10 “Backstage,” Ebony, Nov. 1945, 2; “Backstage,” Ebony, Dec. 1946, 4.

11 “Backstage,” Ebony, Aug. 1947, 8.

12 Johnson and Bennett, 159.

13 Johnson and Bennett, 162; Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 269.

14 Walter White, A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 201.

15 I have chosen to model my method of analyzing reader reception after Joanne Meyerowitz's technique in “Women, Cheesecake, and Borderline Material.” I have read all of the letters to the editor appearing in Ebony between 1945 and 1949 to get a sense of the general reactions of readers. Like Meyerowitz, I realize that this method of reader response is slightly problematic because Ebony selected which letters were printed. Still, I believe it provides a sense of audience reception to the magazine, the version of black femininity it privileged, and the debates that circulated within its pages. See Meyerowitz, Joanne, “Women, Cheesecake, and Borderline Material: Responses to Girlie Pictures in the Mid-twentieth-Century U.S.,” Journal of Women's History, 8, 3 (1996), 9–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 According to my calculations, Ebony published 47 issues between November 1945 and October 1949. Of these 47 issues, 24 covers (or 51·1%) featured a black woman; the remaining percentage of covers featured men or children. Fifteen covers featured black female entertainers. Other Ebony cover girls were described in a variety of ways, for example as model, student, businesswoman, bride, judge, contest winner, lifeguard, housewife, or social worker.

17 “Backstage,” Ebony, Oct. 1947, 6; “Meet the Real Lena Horne,” Ebony, Nov. 1947, 9.

18 Jones, 271.

19 “Meet the Real Lena Horne,” 10.

20 Jones, 234, 272.

21 “Ebony Photo Editorial: Goodbye Mammy, Hello Mom,” Ebony, March 1947, 36–37.

22 Jones, 272.

23 DeKnight, Freda, “Date with a Dish: Lena Horne's Valentine Party,” Ebony, Feb. 1947, 17.Google Scholar

24 “Lena Horne Begins a New Movie,” Ebony, March 1946, 20.

25 “Meet the Real Lena Horne,” 12.

26 “Lena Horne Begins a New Movie,” 20.

27 “Meet the Real Lena Horne,” 11.

28 Ibid..

29 “Lena Horne Begins A New Movie,” 20.

30 “Meet the Real Lena Horne,” 13.

31 “Lena Horne Begins a New Movie,” 20.

32 “Meet the Real Lena Horne,” 14.

33 “Bye-Bye Boogie: Hazel Scott Leaves Night Clubs and Moves to Concert Stage,” Ebony, Nov. 1945, 35.

34 Ibid..

35 Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum, 2001), 125.

36 “Backstage,” Ebony, May 1946, 4.

37 See Westbrook, Robert, “‘I Want a Girl, Just Like the Girl that Married Harry James’: American Women and the Problem of Political Obligation in World War II,” American Quarterly, 42, 4 (1990), 587–614CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sherrie Tucker, Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 239–40.

38 “Lena Horne Begins a New Movie,” 18.

39 Letter from Alta Corinne Payne, Ebony, Mar. 1947, 4.

40 Lena Horne and Richard Schickel, Lena (Garden City: Doubleday, 1986), 172.

41 “Cover,” Ebony, March 1946, 2.

42 Gail Lumet Buckley, The Hornes: An American Family (New York: Applause Books, 1986), 178.

43 bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Amelia Jones, ed., The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003), 95–96.

44 Ibid..

45 Maria Elena Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 248.

46 “Backstage,” Ebony, May 1946, 4.

47 Carby, Hazel, “It Just Be's Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women's Blues,” Radical America, 20, 4 (1986), 9–22, 12Google Scholar; Also see idem, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Tucker, Sherrie, “Uplift and Downbeats: What If Jazz History Included the Prairie View Co-eds?,” Journal of Texas Music History, 2, 2 (2002), 30–38, 33Google Scholar; Tucker poses a similar argument in “Uplift and Downbeats,” contending that the Prairie View Co-eds “may have been unique in their ability to link expressions of political desire of race women with the sensual desire of blueswomen” (34).

48 “Cover,” Ebony, July 1949, 11.

49 Meyerowitz, “Women, Cheesecake, and Borderline Material,” 12.

50 Ibid.., 10.

51 Ibid.., 19.

52 Ibid.., 20–21.

53 Letter from Major D. Lucas, Ebony, May 1947, 3.

54 Letter from Mary Williams, Ebony, May 1947, 3.

55 Letter from Mr. Louis Taylor Jr., Ebony, May 1947, 3; Letter from Irving Cornelius Hale, Ebony, July 1947, 4.

56 Letter from George Nowlin, Ebony, July 1947, 4.

57 Letter from Roosevelt Beal, Ebony, March 1948, 8.

58 Letter from Madame Ebony Beaute, Ebony, Nov. 1946, 4. Also see Letter from Holmes Morgan, Ebony, Aug. 1946, 50; Letter from Garfield Hinton, Ebony, March 1947, 6; and Letter from Albie W. Edwards, Ebony, July 1947, 4.

59 “Chocolate Cream Chanteuse,” Time, 4 Jan. 1943, 62. On “the color complex” see Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall, The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color among African Americans (New York: Doubleday, 1992); and Marita Golden, Don't Play in the Sun: One Woman's Journey through the Color Complex (New York: Doubleday, 2004).

60 Russell, Wilson, and Hall, 2.

61 Horne and Schickel, Lena, 32.

62 Ibid..

63 Nadinola Bleaching Cream Advertisement, “Be Lovely … with Lighter, Smoother Skin Beauty,” Ebony, June 1947, 6; “A Day at Home with a Chorus Girl,” Ebony, Feb. 1946, 20.

64 Letter from Andrew M. Archer, Ebony, May 1948, 8–9. See also Letter from Dorothy H. W. Hunt, Ebony, May 1948, 9.

65 “Backstage,” Ebony, Nov. 1948, 12.

66 See Letter from Estrelda C. Horton, Ebony, May 1949, 6, 8; and Letter from Henry Haifner, Ebony, Sept. 1949, 6.

67 Letter from Mrs. Lonnie Hamilton, Ebony, Jan. 1949, 7.

68 Letter from Lucy J. Ridley, Ebony, Aug. 1949, 10.

69 Renee C. Romano, Race Mixing: Black–White Marriage in Postwar America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 86.

70 Horne and Schickel, 192, 194.

71 “Meet the Real Lena Horne,” Ebony, Nov. 1947, 12.

72 Horne and Schickel, 226.

73 Ibid.., 194.

74 Ibid..

75 Ibid..

76 Letter from Lucy J. Ridley, Ebony, Aug. 1949, 10; Letter from Mary R. Rozier, Ebony, Aug. 1947, 4; and Romano, 88.

77 Romano, 89, 83.

78 Letter from William C. Kennedy, Ebony, Aug. 1947, 4.

79 Letter from Eve Hadley, Ebony, Oct. 1949, 11.

80 Letter from Novena Dashiell, Ebony, Jan. 1949, 6.

81 Romano, 89, 83.

82 Horne and Schickel, Lena, 195, 205, 225–26.

83 Johnson and Bennett, Succeeding against the Odds, 159.