Horne Family research collection

1777-1989

The Horne Family Research Collection documents the life history of the Hornes (formerly spelled Horn) and the Calhouns and their extended family from circa 1777 until the present. Born in Maryland circa 1777, the founding mother of the Calhoun family was Sinai Reynolds, who enjoyed "favored slave" status as the household cook, and was given the opportunity to learn to read and write. After she bought her freedom in 1859, Mrs. Reynolds, her husband Henry, and four of their seven children moved to Chicago. Two of the children had been sold as slaves outside of Georgia, and the eldest child, Nellie, remained in Coweta County as a cook. Nellie's son, Moses Calhoun, who was freed from slavery after the Civil War at age 36, became a restaurateur and a prominent member of Atlanta's black bourgeoisie. His daughters, Cora and Lena were belles of the black South--Cora graduating from Atlanta University, class of 1881 and Lena attending Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, a classmate and romantic interest of W.E.B. Dubois. The Horne branch of the family began in Georgia in 1887 when Nellie's granddaughter, Cora, married Edwin Fletcher Horn, son of a British sea captain of a Tennessee River trading boat, and a Native American.

The Horns lived in Atlanta, Georgia and later moved to Brooklyn, New York, a stronghold of the black bourgeoisie, 10 years later to escape the segregation and violence that, in the wake of Reconstruction's demise, was permeating the South. Horn was an alternate delegate to the 1884 Republican Convention, as well as a school teacher, journalist and entrepreneur. Of their four sons, Frank Smith Horne became a poet, writer-intellectual, optometrist; teacher and a member of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "black cabinet," working in the National Youth Administration. Edwin Fletcher Horne, Jr., known as "Teddy," sportsman and bon vivant, and Edna Scrottron were the parents of the family's most illustrious member, Lena Horne, born in 1917.