Dr. Hannah Thuraisingam Robbins

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.

Right.

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.

Ultimately, I think the civil rights movement is a turning point in her life.

And she...

meets Martin Luther King earlier in that process, who asks her to sing at a rally.

And through that, she becomes involved in fundraising for him, fundraising for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

She works with Eleanor Roosevelt on anti-lynching legislation.

She attends the March on Washington with Josephine Baker.

There's a beautiful photo of them standing in front of the monument.

And this is kind of the beginning of her being very prominently vocal about political activism.