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

So interracial marriage is made legal in California a year later in 1948.

This comes at a time where Lena's film career is starting to stall.

She's refusing to play these anti-black stereotypes and they're trying to push her to do it.

And that leads her to be suspended from MGM's payroll for a period in 1945 because she won't take the part she's being given.

She's also got these associations with radical black groups.

She's pouring her income into union organising and she's known to be a friend of Paul Robeson.

So they have a context in which the studio is starting to see her as a problem.

And then she goes and marries Lenny.

Yeah, so Lena Horne is named in Red Channels as a communist.

And that's basically the end of her time at MGM for a number of years.

She goes to Europe, as you say, Lenny uses his skills to arrange these bespoke versions of songs for her.

And she sets up as one of the premier nightclub performers really in the world and releases a live album in 1957.

And that becomes the biggest selling record by a solo female artist on the RCA Victory label.

Yeah, I think by the peak of fame of Stormy Weather in 43, she was definitely known as a singer and her relationship with Duke Ellington allowed her to really apply herself to her singing style.

But the relationship with Lenny allows her to explore her voice and being away from MGM, where they were very restrictive about where in her voice they would place her songs to force her not to belt, to stop her from opening her mouth too wide.

This is it.

There were all of these kind of racial codings in terms of how her music was arranged at MGM.

Once she and Lenny go on tour, she's able to be free.

And a lot of that musical space that was restricted was open to her again.

So she moves back to the US, sort of the end of the 50s, where she does an obscure musical called Jamaica and becomes the first black woman to be nominated for Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical.

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