In its first issue, Ebony enticed its readership with a photograph “of Lena Horne with a shoe half-off” and a promise to take readers “behind the scenes” of its “coming attractions.”Footnote 3 Four months later, Ebony “chose Lena Horne as cover girl to inaugurate four colors on its cover and to mark her return to Hollywood,” indicating Horne's continued relevance as a symbolic figure in the black press despite the growing disinterest of the white press and the waning attention of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer during the postwar period.Footnote 4 Of this cover and the subsequent reaction of readers, Ebony editor and creator John H. Johnson wrote that one woman had referred to the cover of Horne as “just like a drink of champagne.”Footnote 5 In fact, Johnson's instantly popular, fledgling publication selected Horne as the only woman to appear on its cover three times between November 1945 and October 1949.Footnote 6 In an attempt to assert ownership over Horne's image and to counter her “on-screen personality” as fashioned by the white press and Hollywood during World War II, Ebony chose to construct an off-screen personality for Horne that asserted her relevance as a leading celebrity and political figure among the postwar African American community.
Lena Horne is remembered for her visibility during World War II, a period of racial tension, prejudice, and segregation in the United States and war against Nazism and Fascism abroad. The degree of celebrity reached by Horne during World War II raises important questions about race and representation, similar to those broached by film scholar Richard Dyer and cultural theorist Stuart Hall in their discussions of Paul Robeson, a friend and mentor of Horne: how and why did this era permit a black woman this modicum of celebrity? How did different image-makers represent Horne, and why? What did Horne, popular among black and white Americans, symbolize for black audiences and what did she represent for white audiences? As Stuart Hall contends of audience reception of Robeson, I argue that Horne, in her “performances on stage, theatre and screen,” as well as in her newspaper and magazine images, was “‘read’ differently by black and white audiences.”Footnote 7 These representations and readings of Horne also varied due to historical circumstances.
As I have argued elsewhere, the wartime representations of Horne found in the white press and Hollywood suggested that America was simultaneously a land of progressive liberalism and a nation that upheld white supremacy. Horne's “on-screen personality” allowed audiences to view her as a new type of black female entertainer, who represented America as a land of progress, or to read her as an asexual mammy, “hot” Latina, insatiable octoroon, hypersexual black woman, or “dusky” glamour girl. Her limited screen time and media coverage within the mainstream press allowed white audiences to read these precedented types onto her “on-screen personality” in ways that upheld the racial status quo.Footnote 8
I have also examined some of the diverse meanings Horne's image generated for black audiences during World War II. For example, the Crisis, the official organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), constructed an image of Horne as symbolic of the black middle class on a national scale by imaging her as representative of its cover girls.Footnote 9 Interestingly, Ebony's preference for Horne mirrored the Crisis's use of her image on its covers twice during the early 1940s. Much like the editors of the NAACP's organ the Crisis, the cadre of mostly male editors at Ebony magazine drew on Lena Horne's wartime fame, constructing an off-screen persona for Horne and fashioning a type of African American femininity that fit the periodical's image of postwar black womanhood.
Still, the editorial policies and goals of each magazine differed. The Crisis, tethered to the NAACP, acted as a vehicle for a high-profile organization that lobbied for integration and fought for civil rights. In contrast, Johnson sought to create a popular magazine in the vein of Life that echoed “the zesty side” of black life and revealed the “deeds and accomplishments of Negroes” in America.Footnote 10 In its August 1947 editorial, Ebony described itself as a magazine that “wants to reflect the Negro's everyday life on Main Street from coast to coast, to present him to both white and Negro readers as an ordinary mortal human being – not a freak or a stereotype, not a debate or a resolution.”Footnote 11
Believing that African Americans “needed positive images to fulfill their potential” and “that you have to change images before you can change acts and institutions,” Johnson published the inaugural issue of Ebony in November 1945.Footnote 12 According to Johnson, the initial press run of twenty-five thousand copies “sold out in hours,” and Ebony soon became the most successful African American magazine in circulation, with a readership of over five hundred thousand by 1950.Footnote 13
Throughout the war, Walter White and his entourage had attempted to construct Lena Horne's “on-screen personality” as a symbol of bourgeois respectability, representative of the African American “as a normal human being.”Footnote 14 Similarly, Johnson and his team of writers portrayed Horne in ways that reflected their editorial project, disseminating a version of black femininity that they viewed as uplifting African American readers and educating white readers. Still Ebony, enjoining its readership to “Meet the Real Lena Horne,” differed in constructing an off-screen personality for Horne that acts as a useful trope for understanding how the magazine 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.Footnote 15
Ebony tended to glamorize black female entertainers. Between November 1945 and October 1949 over half of Ebony covers featured black women; of the women highlighted on these covers, fifteen (or approximately 63 percent) were African American female entertainers, described as dancers, actresses, pianists, or singers.Footnote 16 The stories accompanying these covers of black female entertainers purported to provide readers with behind-the-scenes glimpses into these women's everyday lives as workers in exciting careers and as homemakers in their own homes and for their own families. Two such pictorials featuring Lena Horne appeared within the magazine – “Lena Horne Begins a New Movie,” which offered an intimate view of Lena's “real” life as a movie star by allowing readers to follow Horne around the MGM lot on a typical work day, and “Meet the Real Lena Horne,” which promised readers a look at the “private life” of the “Hollywood star” and which Ebony described as a “yarn that will be discussed for months to come.”Footnote 17
In “An Ebony Alternative to the White Feminine Mystique,” historian Jacqueline Jones outlines Ebony's “twist on the postwar feminist ideology that applauded Rosie the Riveter's alleged retreat into the home.”Footnote 18 Johnson's magazine celebrated black women as essential contributors to the financial needs of their families. Ebony's portrayal of Lena Horne as a “working girl” reflected the magazine's desire to provide its readership with images of glamorous black working women.Footnote 19 Despite the fact that, in 1950, 60 percent of working black women labored in service jobs, Ebony, uninterested in replicating the indelible image of the black woman as domestic servant, privileged images of African American women as entertainers, doctors, and judges; the magazine hoped that these thrilling depictions would inspire African American women to achieve higher-paying, professional occupations.Footnote 20
Ebony also lauded African American women's recent ability to say “goodbye” to the role of “Mammy” and “hello” to the role of fulltime “Mom,” thanks to increased (but still doubly discriminatory) wartime wages.Footnote 21 As Jones suggests, “stories about Lena Horne in particular reveal the pride that Ebony writers felt for female performers who valued not only home life but civil rights as well.”Footnote 22Ebony brought its readers into Lena Horne's kitchen, depicting the renowned “Hollywood glamour girl” in her apron as she prepared a dinner of “delicious, delectable East Indian chicken.”Footnote 23 One Ebony article described Horne's “favorite out-of-the-spotlight role” as that of “baby's mama.”Footnote 24 Another featured an image of Horne with her children's photographs as she painted her nails.Footnote 25Ebony told its readers that Horne “likes to think of herself as a working mother,” reported that Horne's income “sometimes hits the $10,000 a week mark,” and quoted her as saying, “I have two kids and I have to work for them … I'm lucky. I thank God for the chance I've been given to give my kids an education and some sort of security.”Footnote 26 Regardless of her fame and income, Horne revealed to Ebony readers her distaste for the glitz and glamour of Hollywood – “the tulle and spangles and pancake makeup.”Footnote 27 Still, Horne, a divorced mother of two, understood that her role as a Hollywood glamour girl afforded her the ability “to make money” and furthered her desire “to give [her] children everything.”Footnote 28 Despite her atypical income, Ebony positioned Horne as a black mother like any other, striving in the race-wide struggle to secure better educational and economic opportunities for future generations of African Americans.Footnote 29
Ebony also touted Horne's civil rights work in the political and entertainment realms. The magazine pictured Horne campaigning for presidential candidate Henry Wallace of the Progressive Citizens of America; Ebony writers discussed her skills as an effective orator and named her “hard-fighting crusader for a better world … where all races can live in dignity.”Footnote 30 Additionally, Ebony reported Horne's ambitions for her Hollywood career in 1946; in the future, she told Ebony, she hoped to avoid her standard role as a specialty singer and to play “straight” parts in Hollywood films as a serious actress. Horne lamented, “It's easier for a colored person to be a singer than an actress” in Hollywood, revealing the film studios' discrimination against black actresses who hoped to play well-developed characters with integral plotlines.Footnote 31 Again, in 1947, Ebony discussed Horne's unrealized desire to eschew “cafe singer parts” for “a good, serious role in a mixed cast movie,” a role that would have proven groundbreaking had Horne's dream ever come to fruition.Footnote 32
Famed pianist Hazel Scott had exposed the same issue in a prior Ebony interview. Like Horne, Scott rejected customary maid roles and usually appeared in Hollywood films “as herself” seated at a piano. In November 1945, Scott told Ebony, “I've done the Scott role in five pictures … I'm beginning to worry about becoming typed.”Footnote 33 Scott explained to Ebony readers the types of roles she aspired to portray: “I could play some of the Negro characters of history, like Sojourner Truth, the Civil War abolitionist, or maybe I could play the part of the Negro WAC of today.”Footnote 34 Unfortunately, Scott's dream of playing a role of substance that would redefine the African American woman in film and, by extension, in society went unfulfilled. She persisted in her struggle with studio executives to appear dignified on-screen but the ongoing battle resulted in the end of her Hollywood career following her final film appearance in Rhapsody in Blue.Footnote 35 Like Horne, Scott continued to receive attention in the black press as a working mother, popular entertainer, and civil rights activist throughout the late 1940s, despite the Hollywood cold shoulder.
Ebony presented both Horne and Scott as beloved pinup girls. Depictions of Scott as “favorite GI pinup” and Horne as “the champion pinup girl of Negro America” bolstered Ebony's assertion that the “billboards, magazine, and pinup posters of [white] America … notwithstanding, Negro girls are beautiful too.”Footnote 36 Imparting its readership with pinup photographs of Lena Horne, Hazel Scott, Hilda Simms, and the like, Ebony tapped into the militaristic rhetoric that fashioned the pinup girl as a patriot who raised soldiers' morale.Footnote 37 The magazine told readers that Lena Horne's “most enthusiastic fans are GIs” and reported that “[p]inup pictures of Lena are plastered on barracks and pup tents around the world.”Footnote 38
American Red Cross librarian Alta Corinne Payne, who wrote an enthusiastic letter to Ebony, described the magazine as “a wonderful morale builder” for “the three thousand men of the mighty 24th Infantry Regiment of Ie Shima.” She informed the editors that the soldiers coveted the pinups, writing,
I manage to … post selected photos on our “Browsing Room” bulletin board. From then on it's one eye on my work and one eye on the bulletin board, or those glamorous pin-ups will find their way to the walls of some homesick GI's barracks or mess hall.”Footnote 39
According to Payne, Ebony's “glamorous pin-ups” lifted the spirits of soldiers stationed abroad; these images reminded black men in uniform of the women they had left home to protect.
In addition, Ebony pinups aimed at black soldiers asserted their right to the same comforts as white GIs. For, as Lena Horne writes in her biography, “If the officers were white it was hardly safe for the Negro soldier to put up any of the fifty or so white lovelies, ranging from Grable to Lamarr.”Footnote 40 Horne's comment reveals the unequal history of gazing across the color line. Ebony illuminated this history when it told readers that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer received “thousands of requests” for Lena Horne's photographs that were “by no means confined to Negro men.”Footnote 41 Similarly, Gail Lumet Buckley, Horne's daughter and biographer, writes that Richard Basehart, a white actor in postwar films, told Horne that he openly carried her picture during the Battle of the Bulge.Footnote 42
In “The Oppositional Gaze,” cultural theorist bell hooks discusses “the real life public circumstances wherein black men were murdered/lynched for looking at white womanhood.”Footnote 43 White men justified lynching under Jim Crow; when a black man looked at a white woman, it was regularly construed “as violation, as ‘rape’ of white womanhood,” yet a white soldier could carry Horne's image in battle without fear of like terrorization.Footnote 44 Horne's observation, that “it was hardly safe” for African American soldiers to display the myriad pinups featuring white women, illuminates the relationship between power and the gaze as well as the need for the production of black pinups.
As art historian Maria Elena Buszek argues, Ebony's photographs of African American pinup girls reveal the subversive potential of cheesecake to challenge dominant images of sexualized women.Footnote 45Ebony, in its pinup images of Lena Horne and other female entertainers, such as Hazel Scott, Hilda Simms, Anne Wiggins Brown, and Katherine Dunham, contended that “there are thousands of Negro girls lovely enough to compete with the best of white American pulchritude.”Footnote 46 These women acted as alternative images of black beauty and sexuality, mediating representations of African American women as asexual “race women” and hypersexual jazz singers.
Ebony's representation of Lena Horne created a space between the image of the stoic “race woman,” who strategically denies her sexuality to uplift the race, and the stereotype of the tragic jazzwoman, who is represented, in the words of Sherrie Tucker, “as intuitive rather than schooled or skilled, and as emotionally and sexually excessive.”Footnote 47 Educated in forms of cultural production dominated by whites, such as film, theater, opera, classical music, and dance, Ebony pinup girls challenged the stereotype of the black female artists as visceral and untrained. Described as successful family women, they challenged the prevailing image of the black female entertainer, such as July 1949 cover model Billie Holiday, as an unloved “victim” without “a decent home.”Footnote 48Ebony pinup girls acted as sexy, modern, and respectable alternatives to the image of the dignified race woman, embodied by April 1949 cover subject Mary McCloud Bethune, inspiring race pride in black readers and challenging the perceptions of white audiences.
By imaging these black female entertainers as pinup girls, Ebony effectively appropriated a form of sexual spectacle deemed respectable by the majority of white society.Footnote 49 The February 1946 issue of Ebony replicated pinup poses made famous by artists of white pinup girls in a feature titled “A Day at Home with a Chorus Girl.” This pictorial displayed several photographs of chorus girl Carmen Alexander bathing in the nude, breasts barely covered by a towel; sitting in front of a window, shades drawn, wearing only a grass skirt and Hawaiian lei; and lying on a bed and holding the pinup girl's requisite telephone. These poses referenced works by championed pinup artists Gil Elvgren, Alberto Vargas, and George Petty, and linked pinups of black women to expressions of sexuality deemed “clean, healthy, and wholesome” by the majority of white Americans.Footnote 50
Ebony strategically relied on the mainstream acceptability of the pinup as a sexualized image to represent a contemporary, sexy version of the respectable black woman. As Joanne Meyerowitz has shown, the letters to the editor from female readers published in Ebony debated the “respectability, beauty, and morality” of the magazine's sexualized representations of women.Footnote 51 Disputants either championed the pinups as demonstrations of “respectable beauty” that “counted as racial advancement” or lambasted them as fodder for racist charges of black immorality that “hindered the struggle for racial progress.”Footnote 52
Contentious letters concerning the March 1947 cover photograph of Ebony Parade star Mabel Lee, wearing a revealing costume, illuminate the heated discussions that unfolded within the pages of Ebony's monthly “Letters and Pictures to the Editor.” Men and women alike debated the cover. Major D. Lucas wrote, “I have just finished reading your March EBONY and I think it was absolutely prideless [sic] of you to put Mabel Lee on the cover of EBONY almost naked.”Footnote 53 Mary Williams agreed, stating, “I do not like the cover of the March issue of EBONY. I am regretful to see the colored people copying the irreligious, immoral selfish living that threatens our downfall.”Footnote 54
One reader called the cover “disgraceful” and another referred to it as giving the impression of “another ‘Police Gazette.’”Footnote 55 Other readers countered these criticisms. George Nowlin “thought it was a fine cover picture”; he wrote, “I see that several people have written saying that they did not like the cover picture on the March issue of EBONY. So I am writing to inform you that there are others among your readers who did like it.”Footnote 56
Covers of Lena Horne did not escape this ongoing debate; of the November 1947 cover featuring Horne, Roosevelt Beal wrote, “That cover bearing the picture of Lena Horne is the best one yet. I want your readers who always criticize your covers to congratulate you on this one. No one can dislike it.”Footnote 57 Although no letters criticizing this particular cover appear in Ebony, Beal's claim that “No one can dislike it” is probably erroneous. Ebony's choice of Horne as cover girl reflected the magazine's privileging of women with light skin over women with dark skin. Many readers debated this editorial preference that excluded a number of black women from Ebony's definition of African American beauty.
One reader, who proudly identified herself as “a dark-skinned gal” pleased with her skin tone, proclaimed, “I am no Lena Horne” and requested that the magazine represent beautiful, dark-skinned women on its future covers – an appeal mirrored by other Ebony readers.Footnote 58 Known for her “chocolate cream” complexion, Horne's status as a three-time Ebony cover girl provides a window into what scholars have termed “the color complex” among black Americans.Footnote 59 According to Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall, “the color complex” involves intraracial discrimination based on skin color, hair texture, and physiognomy.Footnote 60 Historically, “the color complex” is understood as light-skinned African Americans' denigration of dark-skinned African Americans but, as Horne reveals in her autobiography, the complex also involves dark-skinned African Americans' disdain for light-skinned African Americans.
In Lena, Horne's own attempt at constructing her image, Horne describes herself as ambivalent concerning her skin tone and highlights the issue of discrimination among African Americans concerning skin color. Although Horne's skin tone and Anglicized features allowed for her success as a Hollywood film star and glamour girl, the singer/actress's skin color and physiognomy created issues for Horne among other African Americans. During her childhood, peers teased Horne regarding her skin color; at this young age Horne realized that, in the minds of some African Americans, “light color is far from being a status symbol.”Footnote 61 Despite intraracial discrimination on the part of dark-skinned African Americans, predominantly light-skinned models represented the standard of beauty upheld by Ebony as a challenge to an enduring white status quo.
In her autobiography, Horne mentions that “much money was spent on hair-straighteners and skin-lighteners” promoted in popular African American publications such as Ebony.Footnote 62 Unlike the beauty products advertised in the Crisis, white-owned companies manufactured much of the merchandise peddled in Ebony. Within the pages of Ebony, products such as Nadinola Bleaching Cream, offering black women the promise of loveliness through “lighter, smoother skin beauty” and cautioning that “a dark unlovely complexion” may “hurt your popularity,” were juxtaposed with articles featuring light-skinned women as pin-up girls; one such pinup, Carmen Alexander, told Ebony readers, “Color plays a big part in hiring and the lighter the color the better the job.”Footnote 63
Letters to the editor criticized advertisements implying that “the only ‘kissable’ Negro women are those with light complexions” and condemned Ebony as hypocritical.Footnote 64 After receiving a torrent of letters censuring Ebony's implicit support of these advertisements, in 1948 the editors decided to cease featuring the advertisements of twenty accounts it deemed disrespectful to black consumers, including those promoting “skin lighteners, hair straighteners, longer hair and hair wig advertisements.”Footnote 65 Although readers applauded this new policy, subsequent letters to the editor reveal an insufficient change regarding the magazine's choice of advertisements.Footnote 66 One letter in particular, written by Mrs. Lonnie Hamilton, who identified herself as a white woman married to an African American man, described Ebony's continued promotion of skin-lightening and hair-straightening products “a great disappointment” to her and her spouse.Footnote 67Ebony published Lucy J. Ridley's response to this letter in its August 1949 issue. In her reply, Ridley concurred with Hamilton's opinion regarding Ebony's advertising policies but criticized interracial marriage as similar evidence of lack of racial pride among African Americans. Ridley wrote, “It seems to me that if we really appreciated our natural beauty, we would be willing to live with it as man and wife,” illuminating intraracial tensions over the issue of interracial marriage.Footnote 68
Again, Ebony's portrayal of Lena Horne provides a useful lens for examining Ebony's representation of interracial relationships, a contentious issue among African Americans throughout the postwar years. In 1947 Horne secretly married MGM musical director Lennie Hayton, a white conductor, arranger, and pianist, in Paris. Fearing negative reactions from both white and African American fans, the couple dated secretly for three years prior to their marriage and decided to continue their clandestine relationship until publicly announcing their union in 1950. Horne's fears were founded; according to Renee C. Romano, the African American middle class that produced Horne scorned African American women who dated white men “since white male–black female relationships had traditionally been sexually exploitative.”Footnote 69 In her autobiography, Horne recounts fears that Hayton would not marry her, having been taught that white men “will lay [black women], but they will never, never marry [them].”Footnote 70 Still, even when a white man did marry a black woman, the marriage remained suspect and contested.
In November 1947 Ebony questioned Horne concerning rumors of her marriage to Hayton; Ebony reported, “[Horne] denies being wed to anyone and says, ‘I don't know whether I'll ever be. How can you defy the world about marriage when other important things, such as buying a hotel room or casting a vote are denied to you because you're a Negro?’”Footnote 71 Horne did not want her marriage to overshadow her civil rights advocacy or to discredit her among the black press.Footnote 72 Therefore, in this Ebony interview, Horne spotlights racial injustices rather than her relationship. Here Horne's words expose what she would later describe as “the battle within me between two forces.”Footnote 73 Horne described these two forces as a “need for racial pride and identity” and a desire “to simply be [herself].”Footnote 74 Horne, who understood her role as “a symbol of certain Negro aspirations,” felt compelled to live up to her image out of a sense of racial solidarity and pride; at the same time, she loved Hayton and desired to be considered “a person, too,” with the right to marry whomever she chose.Footnote 75
Horne's language reflects several different discourses concerning race and interracial marriage common during the 1940s and 1950s and discussed in Ebony's “Letters and Pictures to the Editor.” Some African Americans, such as Lucy J. Ridley, asserted that interracial marriage represented lack of pride in and allegiance to one's race; in her letter to the editor, Mary R. Rozier encouraged Ebony readers “to stay in their race and stop mixing the races.”Footnote 76 Others, conscious that such oppositions replicated white supremacist arguments against interracial marriage and maintained a rigid color line, framed the debate over black–white marriage in terms of civil and personal rights.Footnote 77
Some African American and white readers viewed interracial marriage as the panacea for America's racial inequity. William C. Kennedy exposed the black–white racial binary as a construction, flouted notions of racial purity, and championed interracial marriage as the solution to racial discrimination when he reminded Ebony readers that “The world's most beautiful people are from mixed ancestry. Look at Lena Horne … Race mixing has always been and will always be. It will kill Jim Crow. It will knock out prejudice.”Footnote 78 Similarly, Eve Hadley, a self-identified “white girl,” championed interracial relationships, writing, “I say, ‘Hooray for love!’ It knocks the stupid color line into a hat!”Footnote 79
Other readers realized the difficulties that faced interracial couples such as Horne and Hayton, and concert singer Anne Wiggins Brown and her Norwegian husband Thorlief Schjelderup. Following an Ebony article detailing the life of newlyweds Brown and Schjelderup that featured photographs of the married couple engaged in an intimate embrace and fireside conversation, Novena Dashiell wrote to Ebony commending the piece. Dashiell applauded Brown's decision to live in Norway, where she might escape America's “social snobbery” concerning “her intermarriage.”Footnote 80 Readers such as Dashiell understood that marrying across the color line entailed sacrifice on the parts of each partner and meant rejection by white as well as African American people.Footnote 81
Horne illuminates these sacrifices and rejections in Lena, describing Hayton's acclimation as he “quickly began to learn to think as a Negro” following their marriage and the painful reactions of family members, white racists, and black fans once she announced her marriage to him in 1950.Footnote 82 Overall, the reasons for Horne's secrecy concerning her relationship with Hayton and the responses it garnered once publicized reflect African Americans' contempt of, ambivalence about, and support for interracial marriage during the 1940s and 1950s.
In spite of her waning mainstream film career, the black press fashioned Horne as a central figure of African American life throughout the late 1940s, as evidenced in Ebony magazine between November 1945 and October 1949. Ebony's editors constructed an off-screen persona for Horne as a talented entertainer, working mother, civil rights activist, and pinup girl. Ebony – its image of Horne, its editorial policy, and its “Letters and Pictures to the Editor” – illuminates postwar debates over racial uplift, respectability, pinup photography, colorism, hair care, and interracial relationships. Although Hollywood and the white press no longer needed Horne to serve their needs, Ebony sought, through its portrayal of Horne's “real” personality, to use Horne's image to advance its goals of changing representations in order to “change acts and institutions.”Footnote 83Ebony's representation of Horne reflects the magazine's desire to expose an interracial readership to images of a sexy, yet respectable, vision of black upward mobility during the postwar period.
