Gail Lumet Buckley obit

Gail Lumet Buckley, Author and Daughter of Lena Horne, Dies at 86

Buckley documented the history of her Black middle-class family in two books. 

She was not on the list.

Gail Lumet Buckley, the daughter of Lena Horne and a journalist and author who wrote two books about the history of her Black middle-class family, died July 18. She was 86.

Her daughter Jenny Lumet, a screenwriter and producer, told The New York Times she died at her home in Santa Monica of heart failure.

Born on Dec. 21, 1937, in Pittsburgh, Buckley grew up in Brooklyn and Los Angeles. Rather than follow her in her mother’s footsteps in Hollywood, she went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe College in Massachusetts in 1959.

She spent some time working in Paris as an intern at Marie Claire magazine before returning to the U.S., serving as a counselor with the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students. Buckley was then hired at Life magazine in 1962.

Later in her journalism career, she also wrote contributing articles for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Daily News of New York and Vogue.

It was in 1986 when she wrote her first book, The Hornes: An American Family, after finding hundreds of artifacts in an old trunk that belonged to her relatives dating back six generations.

“It all unfolded like a detective story — here is what was happening in 1875, there’s what went on in 1895,” she told the Los Angeles Times when The Hornes was published. “And then to read Black American history, as I did extensively, and put that on top of it; that’s an exciting experience.”

Three decades later, she revisited her family’s history with The Black Calhouns: From Civil War to Civil Rights With One African American Family. The book centered on historical events and political movements that impacted two sides of her family: one that lived through Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow in Atlanta, and the other that experienced the Harlem Renaissance in New York City.

She also published American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military From the Revolution to Desert Storm in 2001, for which she received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award the year after.

Her most recent book, Radical Sanctity: Race and Radical Women in the American Catholic Church, was published in 2023. It focused on Katharine Drexel, Dorothy Day, Catherine de Hueck Doherty and Sister Thea Bowman.

Buckley was married to director Sidney Lumet (who died in 2011) for 14 years after they met in 1963. They shared two daughters, Jenny and Amy Lumet.

Additional survivors include her two grandchildren. She was also married to journalist Kevin Buckley for 38 years; he died in 2021.