How Lena Horne Escaped Hollywood's Blacklist. She was a goddess with a honey- sweet voice. She won a Tony in 1. And what of John McCain, once a truth teller on the budgetary excesses of his own party, a pragmatist about the need for immigration reform and a realist about the. Faith Church is a family of followers of Jesus Christ who desire to honor God by applying His sufficient Word to all areas of life and ministry. Afternoon newspaper's site features local news, sports, opinion, outdoors, business, features, and classifieds. The Your Costume Needs Work trope as used in popular culture. This trope covers any scenario where a character is: a celebrity, a Super Hero with a Secret Racism is a product of the complex interaction in a given society of a race-based worldview with prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination. Racism can be present in. The ultimate news source for music, celebrity, entertainment, movies, and current events on the web. It's pop culture on steroids. NAACP medal that had previously been awarded to Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Rosa Parks. When she died in 2. Lolita has 481,516 ratings and 16,196 reviews. Ian said: Between the CoversHaving just re-read Lolita, I asked my local bookseller if she had ever re. Linda Taylor, the haughty thief who drove her Cadillac to the public aid office, was the embodiment of a pernicious stereotype. With her story, Reagan marked millions. Somos Primos Staff Mimi Lozano, Editor Mercy Bautista Olvera Roberto Calderon, Ph,D. Bill Carmena Lila Guzman, Ph.D. President Barack Obama noted that she was the first black singer to tour with an all- white band and that she refused to perform for segregated audiences. Her name had appeared in Red Channels, a report that listed more than 1. For more than three years after that, she struggled to get work. She continued to perform at nightclubs, but nobody in the TV or film industries would hire her. She was at a low point in June 1. Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. The city was not the shining epicenter of entertainment that it is today. It was not even the Las Vegas of Frank Sinatra. There were only a handful of hotels and motels, and the infamous Strip was nonexistent. But Horne had few other options. She closed the show with . On Sands stationery stamped with the hotel motto . All that time, it was sitting in a bankers. But those 1. 2 neatly written pages reveal how a beautiful young black woman became a pawn in the Cold War. She refused to play the maid and prostitute roles usually reserved for black actresses of her time, which narrowed her prospects in Hollywood. At the same time, many black artists accused her of using her lighter skin to . They were distracted by the musicians and mesmerized by Horne. She was learning to personify everything she sang, and to make eye contact with the audience, especially men. In November 1. 94. Harper. She later said that most of what she knew about music she absorbed there. Robeson had seen the world, including the Soviet Union where he was treated like royalty and squired around the country. One night after Horne. His six- foot- three stature matched his voice. As a performer, Robeson had seen the world, including the Soviet Union where he was treated like royalty and squired around the country. As she later detailed in her letter at the Sands Hotel, she told him she was exhausted by the pressures of show business, the racism she faced from the white establishment, and the disdain she heard from black people who accused her of . Finally, he exhorted her to devote her life to making the country a better place, to eradicate her pain by helping people everywhere. He named specific groups such as the Council for African Affairs and the Joint Anti- Fascist Refugee Committee. Horne later said she was unfamiliar with these organizations at the time, but she took Robeson. She knew the country was still in the Great Depression and the world seemed to be growing closer to war. And with the rise of Hitler in Europe, Robeson. His father, Hollywood writer Sam Moore, had been a member of the Communist Party, and George had been active in the youth wing throughout high school and college. In interviews, Moore and a half- dozen other Hollywood ex- communists said that the approach Robeson used with Horne was familiar. Celebrities were advantageous to their cause because they could dress up something most Americans would reject if presented outright, the ex- communists said. The most votes the Communist Party had ever received in a presidential election, a little more than 1. Great Depression. In the post- war era, the communists. Party members were taught to identify the grievances of potential recruits and offer them a vision of a utopia where those problems didn. And Marx, Lenin, or communism itself could never be mentioned. If the communists could capture Horne, her glamour would come with the bonus of an issue the Soviets also believed they could turn to their advantage: bigotry. By the early 1. 94. Walter White, the leader of the NAACP, was embarrassed that the two most successful blacks in film, Hattie Mc. Daniel and Lincoln Perry, were reduced to playing maids and a character named Stepin Fetchit. In one MGM musical after another, she showed up in small roles. In some states, where theaters couldn. I began to feel depressed about it, wasted emotionally. During the war, she traveled with the USO to perform for the troops. When the military excluded black servicemen from one concert, Horne stayed longer and did a separate show just for them. In return, black soldiers wrote to MGM and thanked the studio for giving them their own pin- up girl. She was the perfect mark for Carlton Moss, a 3. But when Horne began to confide her insecurities, he responded the same way Robeson had: He suggested that she channel her frustrations and insecurities into activism. In particular, he urged her to join the Hollywood chapter of an organization called the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, which had been founded to advance President Franklin D. She agreed. If the communists could capture Horne, her glamour would come with the bonus of an issue the Soviets believed they could turn to their advantage: bigotry. The group. Her commitment grew and she was made one of the Citizens Committee. As Time reported in a September 9, 1. Citizens Committee, . But what most of those people, including the notables at the top, didn. In Hollywood, multiple sources confirm, there were only about 3. De Havilland, who served with Horne as a vice- chairman, once told me the total lack of criticism of the Soviet Union was a clue that the organization was under Communist Party control. As Horne became a regular onstage presence at the group. After all, their social circles had allure and advantages. Suddenly the once lonely pin- up girl was running with scientists, authors, and academics. When segregationists in L. A. The celebrities outmuscled the bigots: Horne remained in her house and her ties to Moss grew even stronger. By the spring of 1. Horne was accepting an award from the New Masses Dinner Committee and speaking at a meeting honoring the Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov, sponsored by the Hollywood Writers Mobilization. Interviews with and testimonies from scores of ex- communists confirm that this organization and this affair were carefully designed to draw people like Horne to the communist cause. At the time, there was only a trickle of revelations about Soviet spies in the U. S. Senator Joseph Mc. Carthy. So as Horne continued to praise outspoken advocates and screenwriters, she almost certainly didn. He suggested himself as her ghostwriter, and she took him up on his offer. Horne trusted Moss so completely that she allowed him to read a draft of her autobiography to several of her friends before she. The overall theme of the book was the bigotry she had suffered. But according to Buckley, Horne thought Moss. After he showed her rewrites of the initial chapters, she authorized him to keep going but instructed him not to publish anything until she. All this time, collective memories of the Soviet Union as a wartime ally were fading fast. Stalin had swallowed Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia; anti- communist fervor was starting to boil. The world looked a lot different than it had when Horne first responded to Robeson. Newspapers teemed with headlines about communist spies stealing U. S. De Havilland devised a plan to . She asked Reagan to write a resolution condemning both fascism and communism, which she then introduced at a meeting. The communists rejected it, and de Havilland and Reagan resigned from the organization. De Havilland then receded from the political fervor of the times, while Reagan was galvanized and joined forces with others in Hollywood to respond to the battle the Reds were waging in the entertainment unions. But Horne stayed and was left standing with the communists. In Washington, the House Committee on Un- American Activities launched investigations and high- profile hearings on communism in the motion- picture industry. Horne performed at a fundraiser for 1. After the Supreme Court refused to hear their appeal, all of them went to prison, serving sentences that ranged from six months to a year. Meanwhile, Paul Robeson. Long regarded as a champion of African American causes, he was now just as effusive when it came to the Soviet Union. But he went too far for much of the public on April 2. World Peace Conference in Paris, one of a series of prominent Soviet propaganda gatherings. Robeson declared that black Americans would refuse to fight for the U. S. The next morning, the headline . Many African American leaders objected to Robeson. In his 1. 94. 9 testimony before the House Committee on Un- American Activities, Lester B. Granger, the executive director of the National Urban League, responded directly to Robeson. One enemy is the communist who seeks to destroy the democratic ideal and practice which constitute the Negro. The other enemy is that American racist who perverts and corrupts the democratic concept into a debased philosophy of life. In opposing one enemy, Negro leadership must be careful not to give aid and comfort to the other. Jackie Robinson, Major League Baseball. Johnson, who had rejected communism after serving as one of the party. He said that Robeson had made it his goal to become . He also alleged that one of the party. Brownell told reporters that the government paid Johnson $9,0. But even though the testimony came from a paid informant sharing fanciful schemes, it did lasting damage to Robeson. Lennie Hayton, a musical director from MGM, accompanied her in a professional capacity. He was also her husband, but interracial marriage was still illegal in California and the couple had been keeping their relationship a secret. When members of the press had asked her about the relationship, she. Several pages were devoted to Horne. A short time later, Moss. It was more than 5. Horne later claimed that he sent the manuscript to the publisher without showing her a word of it. But it had her paying tribute to the now- radioactive Robeson. At times, she seemed to suggest that America. In one scene, she arrives at a train station in Washington, D. C., for a performance at Howard Theatre. Ronald Reagan loved to tell stories. When he ran for president in 1. Reagan’s anecdotes converged on a single point: The welfare state is broken, and I’m the man to fix it. On the trail, the Republican candidate told a tale about a fancy public housing complex with a gym and a swimming pool. There was also someone in California, he’d explain incredulously, who supported herself with food stamps while learning the art of witchcraft. And in stump speech after stump speech, Reagan regaled his supporters with the story of an Illinois woman whose feats of deception were too amazing to be believed.“In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record,” the former California governor declared at a campaign rally in January 1. Her tax- free cash income alone has been running $1. As soon as he quoted that dollar amount, the crowd gasped. Four decades later, Reagan’s soliloquies on welfare fraud are often remembered as shameless demagoguery. Many accounts report that Reagan coined the term “welfare queen,” and that this woman in Chicago was a fictional character. In 2. 00. 7, the New York Times’ Paul Krugman wrote that “the bogus story of the Cadillac- driving welfare queen . Her name was Linda Taylor, and it was the Chicago Tribune, not the GOP politician, who dubbed her the “welfare queen.” It was the Tribune, too, that lavished attention on Taylor’s jewelry, furs, and Cadillac—all of which were real. As of 1. 97. 6, Taylor had yet to be convicted of anything. She was facing charges that she’d bilked the government out of $8,0. When the welfare queen stood trial the next year, reporters packed the courtroom. Rather than try to win sympathy, Taylor seemed to enjoy playing the scofflaw. As witnesses described her brazen pilfering from public coffers, she remained impassive, an unrepentant defendant bedecked in expensive clothes and oversize hats. Linda Taylor, the haughty thief who drove her Cadillac to the public aid office, was the embodiment of a pernicious stereotype. With her story, Reagan marked millions of America’s poorest people as potential scoundrels and fostered the belief that welfare fraud was a nationwide epidemic that needed to be stamped out. This image of grand and rampant welfare fraud allowed Reagan to sell voters on his cuts to public assistance spending. The “welfare queen” became a convenient villain, a woman everyone could hate. She was a lazy black con artist, unashamed of cadging the money that honest folks worked so hard to earn. Ronald Reagan addressing a senior citizens group, New Hampshire, 1. Photo by Constantine Manos/Magnum Photos. After her welfare fraud trial in 1. Taylor went to prison, and the newspapers moved on to covering the next outlandish villain. When her sentence was up, she changed her name and left Chicago, and the cops who had pursued her in Illinois lost track of her whereabouts. None of the police officers I talked to knew whether she was still alive. When I set out in search of Linda Taylor, I hoped to find the real story of the woman who played such an outsize role in American politics—who she was, where she came from, and what her life was like before and after she became the national symbol of unearned prosperity. What I found was a woman who destroyed lives, someone far more depraved than even Ronald Reagan could have imagined. In the 1. 97. 0s alone, Taylor was investigated for homicide, kidnapping, and baby trafficking. The detective who tried desperately to put her away believes she’s responsible for one of Chicago’s most legendary crimes, one that remains unsolved to this day. Welfare fraud was likely the least of the welfare queen’s offenses. For those who knew her decades ago, Linda Taylor was a terrifying figure. On multiple occasions, I had potential sources tell me they didn’t think I was really a journalist. Maybe I was trying to kill them. As Lamar Jones tells me about his brief marriage to the welfare queen, he keeps asking how I’ve found him, and why I want to know all of these personal details. If I’m in cahoots with Linda, as he suspects I might be, he assures me that I won’t be able to find him again. He’s just going to disappear. Those who crossed paths with Linda Taylor believe she’s capable of absolutely anything. They also hope she’s dead. Jack Sherwin knew he’d seen her before. Chicago burglary detective was working a case on the city’s South Side. Though her name and face didn’t look familiar, Sherwin recognized the victim’s manner, and her story. She’d been robbed, Linda Taylor explained, and she was sorry to report that the burglar had good taste: $1. Thank heavens, most of it was insured. After listening to her tale of woe, Sherwin asked Taylor if she’d mind getting him some water. When she returned, the detective kept the glass as evidence. Chicago police officer Jack Sherwin in uniform in December 1. Linda Taylor. Courtesy of Jack Sherwin. The fingerprints collected from Taylor’s kitchen helped jog Sherwin’s memory. Two years earlier, the same woman had been charged with making a bogus robbery claim—that time, the thieves had supposedly made off with $1. Sherwin knew Linda Taylor because, out of pure happenstance, he’d been called on to investigate both of these alleged burglaries. She was living in a different part of town, using a different name, and sporting a different head of hair. But this was the same woman, pulling the same stunt. Sherwin cited Taylor, again, for making a false report. But the 3. 5- year- old police officer, a former Marine and a 1. First, he learned that she was getting welfare checks under multiple names. Then he discovered Taylor’s husbands—“Oh, I guess maybe seven men that I knew of,” Sherwin says. The detective and his partner, Jerry Kush, got to work tracking down this parade of grooms, and they found a few who were willing to talk. Sherwin’s hunch had been right: This woman was up to no good. In late September 1. Sherwin met Taylor for the second time, the detective’s findings made the Chicago Tribune. The story detailed a 1. Sherwin had put together illuminating “a lifestyle of false identities that seemed calculated to confuse our computerized, credit- oriented society.” There was evidence that the 4. Taylor had used three Social Security cards, 2. As the Tribune and other outlets stayed on the story, those figures continued to rise. Reporters noted that Linda Taylor had used as many as 8. Ronald Reagan would cite on the campaign trail in 1. The newspaper also directed its ire at the sclerotic bureaucracy that allowed her schemes to flourish. Bliss had been reporting on waste, fraud, and mismanagement in the Illinois Department of Public Aid for a long time prior to Taylor’s emergence. His stories—on doctors who billed Medicaid for fictitious procedures and overworked caseworkers who failed to purge ineligible recipients from the welfare rolls—showed an agency in disarray. That disarray didn’t make for an engaging read, though: “State orders probe of Medicaid” is not a headline that provokes shock and anger. Then the welfare queen came along and dressed the scandal up in a fur coat. This was a crime that people could comprehend, and Linda Taylor was the perfectly unsympathetic figure for outraged citizens to point a finger at. Photo illustration by Holly Allen. Now that the Tribune had found the central character in this ongoing welfare drama, a story about large, dysfunctional institutions became a lot more personal. The failure—or worse, unwillingness—to ferret out Taylor’s dirty deeds revealed more about the flaws of state and county government than any balance sheet ever could. In his report to his superiors at the Chicago Police Department, Sherwin described ping- ponging from the Department of Public Aid to the state’s attorney’s office to the U. S. The Tribune’s headline: “Cops find deceit—but no one cares.”Sherwin eventually found a willing partner in the Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid, a body put together by state legislators eager to take a stand against government waste. The detective also learned that Taylor was wanted on felony welfare fraud charges in Michigan. At the end of August 1. Chicago, then released on bond in advance of an extradition hearing. A month later—and the day after the Tribune told her story for the first time—Linda Taylor didn’t answer when her name was called in Cook County Circuit Court. The most notorious woman in Illinois was on the lam. On Aug. 1. 2, 1. 97. Linda Taylor told Jack Sherwin she’d been robbed—Lamar Jones met his future bride. The 2. 1- year- old sailor was working in the dental clinic at Chicago’s Great Lakes Naval Training Center when a beautiful woman walked in to get her teeth cleaned. Something about her was totally fascinating, Jones remembers. She was beautiful, with the smoothest skin he’d ever seen. She also gave him $1,0. But Lamar and Linda’s marriage lasted only a little longer than their five- day courtship. A few weeks after they exchanged vows, Linda was arrested. When Jones paid her bond, his new wife fled the state. To make things worse, she stole his color TV. The young Navy man realized that something was amiss with his new bride even before the television went missing. When she showed him a degree from a university in Haiti, he noticed that it said Linda Taylor, not Linda Sholvia. Jones says Linda had five mailboxes at her residence at 8. S. Clyde Ave., and she’d get letters in all five, addressed to different names. He got a bit uneasy when Linda told him, after they were married, that he was her eighth husband. She also had a “sister” named Constance who seemed more like her adult daughter. Her skin was so pale and smooth, he says, that she could look Asian, or like a light- skinned black woman, or even white. One night, though, he woke up before dawn and saw that his bride’s smooth skin wasn’t so perfect—she had “1,0. After he caught this illicit glimpse, Linda locked herself in the bathroom for an hour. When she came out, she looked like a whole new person. Photo illustration by Holly Allen.
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