Horne, Frank S.

Frank Smith Horne (1899–1974) was born in New York City on August 18, 1899. An uncle to entertainer Lena Horne, he graduated from the City College of New York (B.A.) in 1921 and earned a doctorate from the Northern Illinois College of Ophthalmology (where he passed for white) a scant 2 years later. Horne practiced optometry in New York and Chicago between 1923 and 1926 before turning to teaching. He completed an M.A. degree from the University of Southern California in 1933 and became a dean and the acting president of Fort Valley State College in Georgia between 1926 and 1935. More than an educator or doctor, the multitalented Horne published award-winning poetry in Crisis and Opportunity and saw his work anthologized in volumes edited by Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Arna Bontemps. Probably best known for “Letters Found Near a Suicide,” his contributions to the Harlem Renaissance were noteworthy, if only a prelude to a life of public service.

Horne's career took a decisive turn when Mary McLeod Bethune recruited him to be the assistant director of the Division of Negro Affairs in the National Youth Administration (1935–1938). Horne soon left that job to work for Dr. Robert C. Weaver, who helped establish the Racial Relations Service (RRS) under the U.S. Housing Authority between 1938 and 1940. By 1940, Horne replaced Weaver as the head of the RRS, becoming after World War II an assistant to the administrator of the new (1947) Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA).

As that agency's chief race relations officer, Horne became nationally recognized for his housing expertise and zealousness in defense of minority interests. In the late 1930s, Horne and Weaver elevated the notion of equity into a policy that not only dispensed public housing on the basis of demographics and need, but offered minority access to construction and management jobs as well. Pushing the concept of equity as far as the changing postwar world would allow, Horne became the strongest voice within the bureaucracy to champion (unsuccessfully) a colorblind policy of nondiscrimination in all housing programs. His lengthy internal memoranda warned accurately of the inevitably disastrous results that would flow from urban redevelopment and renewal carried out on a discriminatory basis. The Eisenhower administration sought the removal of this dedicated New Dealer for political reasons in 1953, but a wave of protest extolling Horne's knowledge and competence forced the Republicans to retain him in a face-saving compromise. Within a year, however, Horne's resistance to the use of government programs to reinforce the ghetto, along with his desire to apply an expansive interpretation of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education to federally supported housing projects, secured his dismissal in 1955. The HHFA, heretofore somewhat restrained by bureaucratic infighting, now accelerated plans that included the massive displacement and forced relocation of minorities in the name of urban renewal.

Following his forced departure, Horne moved back to New York, where he became director of the City Commission on Intergroup Relations and later a staff member of the City Housing Redevelopment Board. He was also a founder of the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing (NCDH) in 1950 [Page 347]and was its honorary chair at the time of his death on September 7, 1974.

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