The Black Calhouns: From Civil War to Civil Rights with One African American Family

by Gail Lumet Buckley

Overview

In The Black Calhouns, Gail Lumet Buckley—daughter of actress Lena Horne—delves deep into her family history, detailing the experiences of an extraordinary African-American family from Civil War to Civil Rights.

Beginning with her great-great grandfather Moses Calhoun, a house slave who used the rare advantage of his education to become a successful businessman in post-war Atlanta, Buckley follows her family’s two branches: one that stayed in the South, and the other that settled in Brooklyn. Through the lens of her relatives’ momentous lives, Buckley examines major events throughout American history. From Atlanta during Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, to New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, and then from World War II to the Civil Rights Movement, this ambitious, brilliant family witnessed and participated in the most crucial events of the 19th and 20th centuries. Combining personal and national history, The Black Calhouns is a unique and vibrant portrait of six generations during dynamic times of struggle and triumph.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802190697
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	02/02/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	50,851
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Gail Lumet Buckley is the author of the national bestsellers American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military from the Revolution to Desert Storm, and The Hornes: An American Family, which became a PBS "American Masters" documentary. She has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, New York Daily News, Washington Post, Vogue, Playboy, and People.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 South/Reconstruction, 1865-1876: Morning/1860s 8

Chapter 2 South/Reconstruction: Noon/1870s 25

Chapter 3 South/Reconstruction: Night/1880s 41

Chapter 4 North/1900-1919: The New Negro 63

Chapter 5 South/1900-1919: The New South 89

Chapter 6 North/1920s: Harlem Renaissance 118

Chapter 7 South/1920s: Terror 138

Chapter 8 North and South/1930s: Lena and Frank 150

Chapter 9 North/1940s: Movie Star Year 170

Chapter 10 South/1940s: War Brides 202

Chapter 11 North/1950s: Blacks and Blacklisting 220

Chapter 12 South/1950s: Postwar 253

Chapter 13 North/1960s: "Now" 270

Chapter 14 South/1960s: Overcoming 292

Coda/1980s Honors/North: Lena 303

Coda/1980s Honors/South: Dr. Homer E. Nash 317

Acknowledgments 323

Sources Cited 327

Index 331

Editorial Reviews

To some extent, The Black Calhouns is a revisiting of Buckley's 1986 biography of her mother's lineage, The Hornes: An American Family. That earlier work focused on the personal lives of specific family members. This book is more occupied with the historical events and political movements that shaped those lives. Written in the style of a sweeping historical novel, The Black Calhouns deals with broad themes of property and politics, duty and determination…This is history from the inside…a comprehensive reminder of how, even when not immediately visible, the burden of racial trauma is carried deep within the body politic.

The New York Times Book Review - Patricia J. Williams

★ 11/23/2015
In this thoroughly engaging family chronicle, Buckley (The Hornes) reveals an expansive tapestry of African-American history since the Civil War. The story begins with her great-great-grandfather Moses Calhoun, a freed slave turned businessman. Buckley never loses sight of the broad canvas, even when her mother, singer and actress Lena Horne, “unavoidably becomes the star of the story.” Giants of African-American culture, often personally connected to the Calhouns, move fluidly through the pages, among them W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Walter White. The family itself produced poets, physicians, politicians, military men, educators, and journalists, as well as a gambler and “rake” connected to the 1919 Black Sox scandal. But as Buckley shows, for all of the comfort of their middle-class status, the Calhouns also lived under the shadow of lynchings, riots, and racist legislation. With branches in both New York City and Atlanta, the family was involved with Reconstruction politics in the South and Depression-era Communist organizing in the North, as well as the civil rights movement. Ever-present details of domestic life (courtship, marriage, children, family squabbles, divorces) hold the sprawling tale together. Buckley’s awesomely informative shout-out to the Calhouns is a treat to read. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow and Nesbit. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for The Black Calhouns

"[A] panoramic view of American society . . . Written in the style of a sweeping historical novel . . . This is history from the inside . . . Buckley charts the generational branches of black Calhouns painstakingly, as though making up for the lost stories of so many other African-Americans left on the cutting room floor. There is an insistence in her meticulously detailed recollections: We were here! We were there! Do not forget!" — New York Times Book Review

"The challenge of reviewing extraordinary books is that they leave one grasping for words. This is certainly the case with Gail Lumet Buckley's The Black Calhouns , a stunning saga of her gifted and privileged family . . . The book's ultimate magic derives from the way the history of black America can be viewed through their story . . . [Buckley's] command of her subject is vast; her narrative skill, masterful." — Boston Globe

"The story of Buckley's ancestors is fascinating for many reasons. Her candid portraits of their experiences offer a window onto shameful episodes in American history that are more recent and relevant than many realize. The stories also represent at least a proxy for the untold stories of so many others whose lives have been conveniently forgotten, excised from national consciousness . . . Buckley's moving chronicle, like Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, should be read in schools across the country." — Christian Science Monitor

"A history cum memoir by Lena Horne's daughter tells the story of her forebears—'six generations of an atypical African American family that is also typically American.' The story begins with the life of Horne's great-grandfather, a Georgia house slave named Moses, and ends with the author's own experiences at mid-century, encompassing along the way Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the growth and splitting of the Calhoun clan: one branch stays in Georgia, the other moves to New York. Placing the story against a backdrop of historical shifts eloquently conveys . . . how politics and prejudice can shape a family." — New Yorker

"[An] assiduously researched and gracefully written family history . . . entrancingly well-told . . . Buckley’s superbly realized American family portrait is enthralling and resounding." — Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

"In this thoroughly engaging family chronicle, Buckley reveals an expansive tapestry of African American history . . . [her] awesomely informative shout-out to the Calhouns is a treat to read." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Gail Lumet Buckley’s family portrait reminds us how personal African American history still is. From Reconstruction and the triumph of Jim Crow in the South to World War II and the beginnings of mass political activism for equality—Buckley relates black survival and progress through the experiences of her ambitious, complicated family." — Darryl Pinckney, author of Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature and Blackballed: The Black Vote and US Democracy

"Deeply personal and historically significant." — David Levering Lewis, Pulitzer Prize winning author of King: A Biography and W. E. B. Du Bois, 1919-1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century

"Gail Lumet Buckley has written another important piece of history; this one about her Calhoun family beginning with her ancestor Moses, who spent a part of his life as a slave. Once freed after the Civil War, Moses became a businessman and founded a family of strong educated women, who kept their families and communities together. It is the history of her extraordinary family in a wider context of Reconstruction, the struggles against Jim Crow and for civil rights." — Frances FitzGerald, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Fire in the Lake

"Not just a family story but an utterly gripping panorama of American life, a passionate, eloquent, and powerful work of history and memoir. Through wars and dubious peace, in the Deep South, in Hollywood, Washington, and New York, the Calhoun family has been at the center of an unending, often bloody and tragic struggle for justice." — Henry Wiencek, author of The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White , winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography

"Buckley brings her luminous style to her luminous family in a compelling story that blends deep historical research with a sure sense of the context of race, politics and entertainment in the late 19th and 20th Centuries. It's her history, but ours, too." — Jonathan Alter, author of the New York Times bestseller The Promise: President Obama, Year One

"Strong men wept when Lena Horne, Gail Lumet Buckley's legendary mother, gave the crowd 'Stormy Weather.' Reading this clear-eyed, bright-hearted family epic, you're liable to shed tears of your own, for the story of Gail and Lena and the black Calhouns is the story of our nation." — Benjamin Taylor, author of Naples Declared and editor of There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction of Saul Bellow

"Readers are fortunate that Gail Buckley did not move to Paris—as she once threatened John F. Kennedy she would—but instead remained in America to research and write this beautiful and moving account of her family—half of whom stayed in the South while the rest moved North—whose courage, perseverance, and accomplishments allowed them to endure and even thrive during a shameful and overlooked period in America’s deeply troubling racist history." — Lily Tuck, author of The Double Life of Liliane

From the Publisher

★ 11/15/2015
Buckley (The Hornes: An American Family), the daughter of actress and civil rights activist Lena Horne, writes here about her family history. Starting with Moses Calhoun, a freed slave in Georgia, the author traces Moses's descendents through two branches, one that stayed in Atlanta and the other that migrated to New York. The Calhouns were a largely successful "Talented Tenth" family that valued education. Buckley focuses primarily on her great-grandmother Cora Calhoun Horne, a well-known clubwoman with the NAACP and the YWCA in Brooklyn. Widely admired, Cora was estranged from her husband, Edwin, who was involved in the Tammany Hall machine. While praising her activist and professional family members, Buckley is also candid about those who gambled, drank, and were abusive. Although the author sometimes loses focus by including each major event in post-Civil War black history, whether relating to her family or not, the book comes alive when she discusses the life of her famous mother and her own childhood. VERDICT This personal and historical account covers much of the same ground as Buckley's previous book, The Hornes; fans of Lena Horne will enjoy. [See Prepub Alert, 8/24/15.]—Kate Stewart, U.S. Senate Lib., Washington, D.C.

Library Journal

2015-10-22
A detailed pursuit of the author's ancestors, from the South to the North. Through the prism of her distant family's story, Buckley (American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military from the Revolution to Desert Storm, 2002, etc.), the daughter of Lena Horne, fleshes out a middle-class black family's journey of hard work, education, and aspiration in a deeply racist United States. Her narrative begins at the time of emancipation for patriarch Moses Calhoun, an educated former butler on a plantation in Atlanta, Georgia, who began to climb the ladder of success in 1865 by marrying, opening a grocery store, buying property, and becoming "a pillar of Atlanta's black community." His daughters, Cora and Lena, were educated in the missionary-run schools at the apex of Reconstruction, just as the Jim Crow laws instituting segregation were taking effect in Tennessee and elsewhere. Cora married the handsome, twice-widowed teacher and Republican activist journalist Edwin Horn in 1888 and moved to New York City in 1896, part of the great Northern migration of the Talented Tenth (W.E.B. Du Bois' name for the country's highly educated blacks). Edwin would switch party affiliations and become a "political New Negro," a Democrat, and leader of the so-called Black Tammany; the couple joined the Brooklyn bourgeoisie and the NAACP. With the birth of their granddaughter, Lena Calhoun Horne, in 1917, the story inevitably follows the rising star of the author's mother, largely abandoned by her parents and raised by her grandmother, Cora, through the heady Harlem Prohibition years (also the height of lynchings in the South). While Lena's dark skin was both a hindrance and help to her career (too dark for the white stage, too white for the black), she found her movie-star spot during World War II. The author later weaves her own story of 1960s political awakening into this thoroughly jam-packed narrative of history and nostalgia. Contains several memoirs in one: ambitious, relentless, and occasionally messy.

Kirkus Reviews