My identity is very clear to me now, I am a black woman, I’m not alone, I’m free…I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.

Lena Horne, an American actress and civil rights activist who first came to fame in the 1940s and starred in such films as Cabin in the Sky (1942) and Stormy Weather (1943), was born in Brooklyn, New York, this day in 1917.