General
Gail Lumet Buckley, Chronicler of Black Family History, Dies at 86
She wrote two books about multiple generations of her forebears, including her mother, Lena Horne.
Gail Lumet Buckley, who rather than follow her mother, Lena Horne, into show business, wrote two multigenerational books about their ambitious Black middle-class family, died on July 18 at her home in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 86.
Her daughter Jenny Lumet, a screenwriter and film and television producer, said the cause was heart failure.
Mrs. Buckley was first inspired to chronicle her family history in the early 1980s when her mother asked her to store an old trunk in her basement. It had belonged to Ms. Horne’s father, Edwin Jr., known as Teddy, and contained hundreds of artifacts that had belonged to relatives dating back six generations to Sinai Reynolds, who had been born into slavery around 1777 and in 1859 bought her freedom and that of some members of her family.
“There were photographs, letters, bills, notes,” Mrs. Buckley told The New York Times during a joint interview with her mother in 1986, as well as “speakeasy tickets, gambling receipts, college diplomas.”
Those disparate paper fragments of history helped her structure “The Hornes: An American Family” (1986).
