by Nahlah Abdur-Rahman
July 29, 2024
Buckley was an acclaimed writer known for her novels detailing her family’s Black middle-class history.
Gail Lumet Buckley, author and daughter of Lena Horne, has died at 86. Buckley’s daughter confirmed her death occurred on July 18.
Born in 1937 to Horne and Louis Jordan Jones, a political operative, Buckley built a career for herself through novels focusing on her family’s Black middle-class background. Buckley spent her childhood between Brooklyn and Los Angeles before pursuing a bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe College in 1959. At the time of her enrollment, the school was an independent women’s college. It later integrated into Harvard University in 1999.
Despite her mother’s successful career in Hollywood, Buckley veered toward academia and literature. However, she continued her mother’s mission of racial justice, serving as a counselor with the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students.
She officially began her career in journalism with a stint at Life magazine in 1962. She became a contributing writer for The New York Times, Vogue, and other publications. However, her first book, The Hornes: An American Family, was published in 1986. Its extensive detail into the livelihoods of the Black middle class captivated readers.
Buckley wrote the novel upon finding artifacts in a trunk belonging to her maternal grandfather. The items, ranging from photographs to letters and bills, went back six generations of Buckley’s family.
She continued her deep dive into her family’s history in later works. In 2016, she published The Black Calhouns: From Civil War to Civil Rights With One African American Family. The book centered on how one side of her family endured Reconstruction and Jim Crow in Atlanta while the other thrived in the Harlem Renaissance.
“Today, however, it is important to let people know ‘what’ I am,” she wrote in the introduction, The New York Times reported. “I identify myself as African American to let others know that I am one of America’s historical stepchildren. The quality of African American life, like that of all stepchildren, depends on the spiritual, philosophical, and political character of the stepparent and stepsiblings.”
Buckley wrote two more novels, both on the themes of race. Her 2001 work, American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military From the Revolution to Desert Storm,” won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award the following year.
Her legacy lives on as a prolific writer whose work sheds light on the unique histories of Black America. She is survived by two grandchildren and her two daughters, Amy and Jenny.
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