April D. Ryan

Statement by the President on the Passing of Lena Horne

Michelle and I were deeply saddened to hear about the passing of Lena Horne - one of our nation’s most cherished entertainers. Over the years, she warmed the hearts of countless Americans with her beautiful voice and dramatic performances on screen. From the time her grandmother signed her up for an NAACP membership as a child, she worked tirelessly to further the cause of justice and equality. In 1940, she became the first African American performer to tour with an all white band. And while entertaining soldiers during World War II, she refused to perform for segregated audiences - a principled struggle she continued well after the troops returned home. Michelle and I offer our condolences to all those who knew and loved Lena , and we join all Americans in appreciating the joy she brought to our lives and the progress she forged for our country.

Legendary jazz singer Lena Horne, who starred in ‘Cabin in the Sky’ in 1943, died Sunday. She was 92. Horne died at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, according to hospital spokeswoman Gloria Chin. Chin would not release any other details. Her death was announced by her son-in-law, Kevin Buckley. Horne is survived by her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley.

In the 1940s, Horne was one of the first black performers hired to sing with a major white band, the first to play the Copacabana nightclub and among a handful with a Hollywood contract. In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century-Fox to play the role of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical ‘Stormy Weather.’ Her rendition of the title song became a major hit and her signature piece.

 
“I was always battling the system to try to get to be with my people. Finally, I wouldn’t work for places that kept us out … it was a damn fight everywhere I was, every place I worked, in New York, in Hollywood, all over the world,” she said in Brian Lanker’s book, ‘I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America.’

By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in the civil rights movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who made a racial slur in a Beverly Hills restaurant and in 1963 joining 250,000 others in the March on Washington when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Horne also spoke at a rally that same year with another civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, just days before his assassination.

President Obama has nominated Elena Kagan, former Dean of the Harvard Law School as his next pick for the United States Supreme Court.

 
Kagan beat out a list of about two dozen potentials that included two African American Judges, Ann Claire Williams and Leah Ward Sears.   Sources contend neither Williams nor Ward recieved Oval Office interviews with President Obama.  On at least one occassion Civil Rights leaders met with Obama administration officials on what they were looking for in the President’s next Supreme Court pick.

Kagan, the current United States Solicitor General, was on the Supreme Court potentials list twice.  She did not make the cut in the first round of Supreme Court picks.  President picked Sonia Sotomayor in 2009.

Meanwhile, Kurt Schmoke, Dean of the Howard Law school contends Kagan’s pick is symbolic saying, “she chose to be named the Charles Hamilton Houston Professor of law. Charles Hamilton Houston was one of the first African American graduates of the Harvard School of Law, a leading Civil Rights Lawer, Dean of the Howard Law School, the the first counsel for the NAACP. He was the guy who set the strategy for the Brown V. Board of education case.”

 
Kagan was also a law clerk for then Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court Justice.

 
The RNC is attacking Kagan for quoting from a speech Justice Marshall gave in 1987 in which he said the Constitution as originally conceived and drafted was “defective.” She quoted him as saying the Supreme Court’s mission was to “show a special solicitude for the despised and the disadvantaged.” 

At the White House Ceremony announcing her nomination, Elena Kagan said, “I have felt blessed to represent the United States before the Supreme Court, to walk into the highest Court in this country when it is deciding its most important cases, cases that have an impact on so many people’s lives. And to represent the United States there is the most thrilling and the most humbling task a lawyer can perform.”