Dr. Hannah Tericium Robbins

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404 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 20 Feb

Dr. Hannah Tericium Robbins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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You're Dead to Me · Lena Horne: racism and resilience in the Golden Age of Hollywood · 20 Feb 2026 podcast

And yeah, as you say, they are all black cast.

So it's important to say that everybody behind the camera was white.

And what happened there was they got the great and good of black performance into these films and created these amazing sort of bacchanals, if you like, celebrations in those films.

They are the only examples where Lena Horne has dialogue, where she gets to interact with other people, and she actually has character arcs.

After that, she basically loses the opportunity to have a meaningful interaction with the plot of any musical film.

Yes, there's an amazing sequence.

I recommend you watch the first five minutes of Till the Clouds Roll By from 1946.

This is a biopic about the composer Jerome McCurn.

And in it, they stage a sequence from the musical Show Boat.

Oh, they cut together several scenes, actually.

And...

That is one of the few scenes in which Lena Horne appears with a mass of white people.

But what happens is every actor in that gets a freeze frame for two, five seconds and then is in a group.

They briefly show Lena Horne and then she literally backs out of shot and then is not in the wide frame, wide angle group shots.

So there was literal removal from physical action taking place.

But she became...

what was really the fate of all black actors at the time which is referred to as a feature actor she would be given a song number sometimes with some dance it would be irrelevant to the plot she wouldn't have often a named character she would often be appearing as Lena Horne and those scenes could just be I mean but she could just be cut those scenes could just be cut from the film so for example she made a joke in the 80s about the fact that when she went to Texas for the first time no one had ever seen her in the film she was in

In the 40s, the white press couldn't decide what her skin tone was, but one of the ways in which she was racialised

is that they always refer to her skin colour.

But in headlines, she was referred to as sepia, as copper, as chocolate.

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