As part of the 332nd Fighter Group, in March 1945 the Ninety-Ninth won the Distinguished Unit Citation (highest unit citation) for the 1,600-mile round-trip air attack on Berlin. By this time, they had flown 1,578 combat missions and won 95 Distinguished Flying Crosses, 1 Silver Star, 1 Legion of Merit, 14 Bronze Stars, 744 Air Medals and Clusters, and 8 Purple Hearts and were the first U.S. pilots to shoot down a German jet. Because they were officers, the handful of black pilots captured by the Germans received better treatment as prisoners of war than they did as American citizens in Tuskegee, Alabama. When the unit came home, not one member could get a job as a pilot anywhere in the United States.
Meanwhile, in Atlanta, Dr. Homer Nash, the father-in-law of a Tuskegee Airman, was honored for his civilian service:
THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA has awarded this Certificate of Appreciation to H. E. Nash, M.D. in grateful recognition of uncompensated services patriotically rendered his country in the administration of the Selective Service System for the period of two years.
The only decipherable signatures belonged to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lewis B. Hershey, head of the Selective Service.
More important, Aunt Kate Graves got married at last. Kate Graves, who had accompanied Cousin Catherine on her 1928 trip to Fort Valley to meet Lena Horne, had always seemed the perfect maiden aunt. No one ever expected Kate, an independent career woman and fashion plate, to marry. According to her niece Kathryn Brown’s 1941 doggerel, Aunt Kate was “Efficiency Expert No. 1 / She knows just what there is to do / And how it should be done.” Kate Graves married an old friend, a tall, attractive widower named William Arnold Sr., who came with a grown physician son, an adorable grandson, and a nice daughter-in-law. Kate came with sisters, brothers-in-law, and adult nieces and nephews. Their marriage license from the state of Georgia, Fulton County, read:
To any minister of the Gospel, Judge of the Superior Court, Justice of the Peace, or any other person authorized to solemnize: You are hereby authorized to join in the Honorable State of Matrimony William J. Arnold, Sr. (COL) and Catherine F. Graves (COL).
“COL,” of course, meant colored. They were married on October 7, 1944. Kate, very elegant all of her life, was a lovely bride in a longsleeved, floor-length dinner dress. Her posture and figure were perfect. Kate was a very good fifty-five. She had a very happy marriage.
Kate kept a sort of wedding week diary on her new stationery—as Mrs. Catherine Graves Arnold, 522 Auburn Ave. NE, Atlanta, Georgia:
After the wedding, Sat. nite supper with Dr. and Mrs. Hackney 10:30 in honor of Dr. and Mrs. W. G. Arnold, Jr. of Detroit.
Sunday morn 8:30 at the Union Station to see Dr. and Mrs. W.G.
Arnold, Jr. off to Detroit.
After breakfast Dr. and Mrs. H.E. Nash called.
Later we went to the cemetery to take the wedding flowers.
Monday nite 10-9-’44
A stag was given for the groom by Mr. Johnnie James.
Tuesday nite 10-10-’44
a dinner for the groom at the home of Mr. Jenkins, Hunter Street.
Tuesday nite 10-10-’44
Mr. and Mrs. W. J. Arnold, Sr. were invited to a bridge party at the home of Prof and Mrs. C.L. Harper in honor of Dr. and Mrs. Raiford of Detroit, Michigan.
Friday 10-13-’44
The bride and groom spent together.
The bride was invited to a bridge party given by Dr. H. Ward Warner.
The bride was unable to attend.
Sat. 10-14-’44
The groom attended the first football game of the season at Ponce de Leon park. After the game, supper with the bride, groom, and mother of the bride. The rest of the evening the bride and groom spent together.
Sunday 10-15-’44
After breakfast, the bride and groom attended the groom’s church.
The brief wedding “diary” is a good portrait of Southern black middle-class life: parties, bridge, football, family, and church.
In 1944, an election year, Walter White called the Democratic platform a “splinter”:
We believe that racial and religious minorities have the right to live, develop, and vote equally with all citizens and share the rights that are guaranteed by our Constitution. Congress shall exert its full constitutional powers to protect these rights.
The Democrats were always a schizophrenic party—ranging from left-wing Northern liberals to right-wing Southern racists. The statement referring to the Constitution and Congress belongs to the North. What was not mentioned was decided by the South: the Fair Employment Practices Committee, the poll tax, antilynching legislation, and military discrimination. Meanwhile, Northern Democrats quarreled among themselves over replacing the brilliant (if eccentric) scientist-agronomist Henry Wallace as vice president with Harry Truman, the Missouri haberdasher. Blacks especially favored the Midwestern Wallace over the quasi-Southerner Truman. (Missouri was a slave state that stayed in the Union.) Several Negro newspapers, including the Pittsburgh Courier and New York Amsterdam News, endorsed Republican Thomas E. Dewey—although later Truman proved to be a friend of blacks when he desegregated the military, causing white Southerners to bolt from the party and become the Dixiecrats.
The Republican platform was less of a “splinter” than the Democratic platform:
We unreservedly condemn the injection into American life of appeals to racial and religious prejudice … We pledge the establishment by Federal legislation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission. The payment of any poll tax should not be a condition of voting in Federal elections and we favor immediate submission of a Constitutional amendment for its abolition … We favor legislation against lynching and pledge our sincere efforts in behalf of its early enactment.
The Republican platform should have appealed to more blacks. The problem was FDR, the magical man whose voice and personality were made for radio. The other problem was political. Local Democratic machines in the ghettos of the North took care of the poor all year round—all they asked in return was a party line vote every few years. Reformers wailed; the voters could not understand the fuss. Why would they bite the hand that fed them?
The Socialist platform echoed the Republicans:
We condemn anti-Semitism, Jim-Crowism, and every form of race discrimination and segregation in the armed forces as well as civil life. We urge the passage of anti-lynching and anti-poll tax laws and the prompt enactment of legislation to set up a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee … An America disgraced by racial tensions which occasionally find expression in lynching and race riots cannot lead the way to a peace which depends upon worldwide reconciliation of races on the basis of equality of right.
In 1944 the United Negro College Fund was chartered to support historically black Missionary colleges—by then all falling on hard times thanks to constantly diminishing Southern state support. The Missionary colleges clearly meant everything to Southern blacks—not only because they brought light where there had been strictly imposed darkness, but because they were centers of community pride and civil rights activism as well as learning. By 1964 the fund had raised $34 million. So many wonderful minds were, indeed, not wasted thanks to Missionary schools and colleges and the devoted teachers and benefactors who supported them, black and white. Certainly Cora Horne and all the black Calhouns who had been educated in Missionary colleges and to whom education was so very important would have been pleased.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
North/1950s
BLACKS AND BLACKLISTING
LENA WAS a victim of the blacklist—but she was not an entirely innocent victim. She knew exactly what she was doing—sort of. Between 1946 and 1948 she made a sharp turn to the left. What we know as the red-baiting 1950s actually began toward the end of 1947, when ten screenwriters and directors, known as the “Hollywood Ten,” were given prison terms for refusing to testify before a congressional committee. All were former or current members of the then legal Communist Party. And all were m
embers of the Screen Writers Guild, which the producers above all wanted to break. The Hollywood Ten opened the floodgates of blacklisting—which was also an excuse for anti-Semitism, racism, and guilt by association.
All of Lena’s political mentors were men of the Left: Uncle Frank Horne, the black New Dealer; poet-professor Sterling Brown, who liked Lena’s “clarinet” voice and said “the first African off the boat turned left”; Walter White of the NAACP, the organization in which her grandmother enrolled her at the age of two as a lifetime member, who suddenly popped up to “guide” her career in Hollywood; Barney Josephson of Café Society, a white, jazz-loving, Jewish Communist whose brother died in Spain; W. E. B. Du Bois, the great black radical, who had been in love with Cora Horne’s sister, Lena Smith; and, finally, Paul Robeson, her grandmother’s protégé. Robeson was clearly the most unforgettable teacher. He always spoke very simply and clearly. No matter how far she rose, he said, she was “never, never to forget the people down the line—the Pullman porters.”
Frank Horne, seated, bottom row on the left, with almost every important black man in America in the 1950s—including Ralph Bunche, William Hastie, Roy Wilkins, and Robert Weaver
For a long time, especially in Hollywood, Lena suffered both inwardly and outwardly under the dual curse of not being “black enough” to be a “real” Negro, but on the other hand being “too black” to be a “real” movie star. I believe that her leftward turn was partly a search for authenticity, as well as a response to a greater disappointment than she ever revealed when she understood that she was never going to have a movie career. It was at Café Society that Robeson told her that she had not yet become “Lena Horne, Negro.” Now Lena, aware of her “privileges,” was trying very hard to become a Negro. She began to see politics through the prism of color. No one was happier to exploit this than the CPUSA, which at that point was seeking to become more American and less Soviet. Until the Scottsboro Boys became an issue, the CPUSA couldn’t figure out what to do about Southern Negroes. The whole dialectic depended on an educated, self-confident proletariat—hardly descriptive of the illiterate, fear-ridden serfs and peasants of the American South. Black Communists in America tended to be educated members of the middle class. The black Southern masses would be impossible to organize. Lena’s entire political philosophy could be summed up for a four-year-old: most Communists seemed to want to help Negroes and most anticommunists seemed to want to hurt them. Lena believed that her enemies were not Communists, but only the fierce anticommunists who were just as fiercely anti-Negro. She never joined the Communist Party—Paul Robeson told her not to. She believed the party line on race because it was not dissimilar from the philosophy of her grandparents and favorite uncle. Lena had zero interest in Soviet ideology or philosophy. She would have been a terrible Communist—all emotion, no discipline. In the words of writer-editor Paul Berman, reviewing a book in the New York Times about Czech writers under Nazi and Communist regimes: “A Communist, one could almost say, is a good-hearted person who knows nothing about Communism.”
Besides the fact that Lena was no “innocent” victim of the blacklist, she was a lucky victim. People suspected of lesser “crimes” than hers saw their lives and careers in ruins. Larry Parks, whose life and livelihood the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) destroyed mostly because he was Jewish, lived right across the road from us in Hollywood with his wife, Betty Garrett. And wonderful Marsha Hunt, whose liberal ideals included membership in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, made more than fifty films between 1935 and 1949 and three between 1949 and 1957. Lena was banned from network TV for ten years and from movies for six years, but her earning power in nightclubs was never diminished. She made $60,000 a week at the Copacabana in 1948 and the money only increased through the blacklist years. Lena’s career and livelihood were basically saved because the Jewish Mafia, which controlled America’s biggest nightclubs in places like New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami, could not afford to have her blacklisted. She was, in fact, its consistently biggest draw, guaranteeing sold-out crowds. She brought in exactly the right crowd of rich sophisticates, VIPs, and high rollers. She had first encountered the Jewish mob in 1945 at the Flamingo Hotel, in Las Vegas, when she complained to Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel about the crude introductions she had been receiving from Xavier Cugat, the racist leader of a rhumba band, who was supposed to announce her entrance. “I am so sorry, Miss Horne,” said Bugsy Siegel. “Don’t worry—I will take care of this personally.” By the next show, the rhumba king was groveling. That same year, Louis B. Mayer had asked Lena as a favor to sing at Chicago’s Chez Paree, one of the biggest of the Jewish mob-controlled nightclubs, where, playing for less than her normal salary, she broke house records and the management gave her a star sapphire ring. The owner of Miami’s Clover Club lent her his own house when she could not find a decent place to stay. Nightclubs truly seemed to be the only place where a performer’s talent was more important than her race. There was nothing the men who ran the nightclubs for the mob would not do for Lena—from giving her expensive jewelry to helping get her name off the blacklist. And this turned out to be very important.
Lena had not made it easy for them, and the immediate postwar period had not made it easy for her. Seven Negroes were lynched between 1940 and 1945; six were lynched in 1946 alone. Lena had decided to fight the postwar battles. On June 6, 1946, she appeared at a Madison Square Garden rally for “Big Three Unity for Colonial Freedom” with Robeson, Mary McLeod Bethune, writer Norman Corwin (the king of radio drama), Judy Holliday, and others. Lena probably did almost anything Robeson asked her to do—after all, he was family. According to Martin Duberman’s Paul Robeson, there were rumors that my mother and Robeson had a romantic relationship, but she denied the story to several Robeson biographers. I believe my mother. First, there was the age difference: the year that she was born he was having his knuckles crushed playing football for Rutgers and making Walter Camp’s all-American list. Despite Robeson’s undeniably extraordinary warmth, charm, charisma, and gentle-giant appeal to women, Lena was never attracted to alpha males (Joe Louis was the exception that proved the rule). Lena hero-worshipped Robeson for sure, but that was all. She really liked “softer” men—Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes, for example, not Clark Gable as Rhett Butler.
Within a year Lena was deeply involved in politics, both accidentally and on purpose. She had no idea, of course, that she would become a Daily Worker front-page heroine. August 21, 1947, was Lena Horne Day in Brooklyn. The Daily Worker covered the story on its front page:
Brooklyn Welcomes Lena Horne Home
The warmth and humanity that is Brooklyn was extended yesterday to actress Lena Horne, for her contribution to the screen and amity between races. The local girl, born at 189 Chauncey St., in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area, was cheered and paraded through the streets of the borough which celebrated Lena Horne Homecoming Day. Brooklyn, the county with the first Communist Councilman and Negro ball player in the major leagues, in honoring Miss Horne did itself proud.
Lena was upset that no one bothered to invite any of her old school friends.
By August 1947 she had already made one major decision, to marry Lennie Hayton in Paris since they were an illegal couple in California; and one minor decision, to write a monthly column for the People’s Voice, a left-wing black paper whose other columnists included Robeson and Du Bois. She would not actually write it; she simply had to give the writers a few names, events, and activities. Some of the columns had elements of the truth, but most were pure party line.
From July 26, 1947, to January 10, 1948, five and a half months, “Lena Horne” appeared to have a regular column in the People’s Voice. I used the word “appeared” because anyone who knew my mother even casually would know that she never wrote the column for October 18, 1947, for example. I laughed out loud when I read:
I love football … I go to as many games as my schedule permits and get my kicks from a well-tossed forward
pass or a dazzling end run … I love to see a flashy broken-field runner, a great drop-kicker or a hard-tackling end.
Of course, the really important part of the column starts here:
As a football fan I’ve been interested in the growth of democracy within the sport, particularly the increasing participation of Negroes in both college and professional football … Some of our Southern brethren are also beginning to take note of the trend towards democracy in sports. Last Saturday an historic event took place in Charlottesville, Va., when the University of Virginia took the field against Harvard University which had a Negro, Chester Pierce, on its squad … Southern teams have regularly refused to play colleges with Negroes on their teams, whether in the North or South … There was another lesson in democracy given last week-end in Charlottesville. The Harvard team had been billeted in a downtown hotel, and Pierce had been assigned to the annex of the hotel. The Harvard men, however, held a meeting and decided that team-play should exist off the football field as well as on it. They voted unanimously to move in with Pierce, and, that’s where they stayed. This happened right in the heart of Virginia. Who said Jim Crow can’t be licked?
The Black Calhouns Page 23