Gail Lumet Buckley, Chronicler of Black Family History, Dies at 86

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 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 who in 1859 bought her freedom and that of members of her family.

“There were photographs, letters, bills, notes,” Mrs. Buckley told The New York Times in 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).

“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 book 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.”

She opened her story after the Revolutionary War and carried it through the Civil War, Reconstruction and the 20th century, when her mother became a star, beginning an incandescent career in the Cotton Club chorus in Harlem as a teenager in the 1930s.

The book’s main characters, in addition to Ms. Horne, include Moses Calhoun, a house slave owned by the Calhoun family, who, after being freed, became a wealthy businessman in Atlanta; and his daughter Cora, a feminist, suffragist and college graduate, who was a grandmother of Lena Horne and who helped raise her.

Cora’s husband, Edwin Horne Sr., a journalist in Indiana, moved with Cora to New York City to escape racism and became active in politics and worked as a fire inspector.

“What is most significant about ‘The Hornes,’” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in his review in The New York Times, “is that it is a history of the Black bourgeoisie, or that elite class of people that, according to Mrs. Buckley, originated with what were slaves of the house (as opposed to slaves of the field) and came to be made up of a set of leading families who mirrored as best it could the elite of white society.”

In 2016, 30 years after “The Hornes,” Mrs. Buckley revisited her past with “The Black Calhouns: From Civil War to Civil Rights With One African American Family.” The book focused on historical events and political movements as they affected two branches of the family: one (whose patriarch was Moses) that remained in Atlanta and lived through Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, and one that settled in New York City and experienced the Harlem Renaissance.

Mrs. Buckley wrote in her introduction that the book was part history — about “an atypical African American family that is also typically American” — and part memoir, starting with her birth in 1937.

“Today, however, it is important to let people know ‘what’ I am,” she wrote. “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.”

Gail Horne Jones was born on Dec. 21, 1937, in Pittsburgh and grew up in Brooklyn and Los Angeles. Her mother was briefly married to Gail’s father, Louis Jordan Jones, who owned funeral homes and published a magazine for the United States Post Office. They divorced when Gail was a baby. In 1947, Ms. Horne married Lennie Hayton, a white composer, conductor and arranger.

Mrs. Buckley earned a bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe College in Massachusetts in 1959. After working in Paris as an intern at Marie Claire magazine, she returned to the United States and became a counselor with the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students, advising high school students about available scholarships. In 1962, she was hired at Life magazine, where she clipped newspaper and wire service articles.

In 1963, she was introduced to the film and television director Sidney Lumet through James Lipton, a friend of her mother and stepfather’s. (Mr. Lipton was later known as the ultra-inquisitive host of the TV series “Inside the Actors Studio.”) She and Mr. Lumet married that year.

They divorced after 14 years. “Sidney and I were not on the same wavelength, religiously or politically,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1986.

After a long break during her marriage to raise her daughters, Mrs. Buckley turned to freelance writing, contributing articles to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Daily News of New York and Vogue.

In 2001, she published “American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military From the Revolution to Desert Storm,” for which she spent more than a decade doing research, which included interviewing Black veterans. One of those who inspired her was a great-uncle, Errol Horne, whose photograph, in his World War I lieutenant’s uniform, had fascinated her when she was a child.

“I had always been told he chased Pancho Villa into Mexico,” she told The Daily News in 2001. “And he did.”

She also wrote about the all-Black 369th Infantry Regiment — known as the Harlem Hellfighters — which fought with the French during World War I.

President Woodrow Wilson “gave the 369th to the desperate French because he did not want Blacks fighting for America,” Mrs. Buckley wrote. The president, she added, “did not want the world to learn about Black heroism — even though the first American soldiers to receive the Croix de Guerre, Sergeant Henry Johnson and Private Needham Roberts, belonged to the 369th.”

In 2002, Mrs. Buckley received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for “American Patriots.”

Mrs. Buckley’s most recent book, “Radical Sanctity: Race and Radical Women in the American Catholic Church” (2023), is about Katharine Drexel, the heiress canonized by Pope John Paul II, and three others, Dorothy Day, Catherine de Hueck Doherty and Sister Thea Bowman, who were declared servants of God by the Catholic Church, a step on the road to possible canonization.

In addition to her daughter Jenny, Mrs. Buckley is survived by another daughter, Amy Lumet, a film producer who also works in animal rescue, and two grandchildren. Her 38-year marriage to the journalist Kevin Buckley ended with his death in 2021. Her brother, known as Teddy, died in 1970.

Ms. Horne, who died in 2010, wept when she read “The Hornes.”

“I loved finding the little girl in you,” Mrs. Buckley told her mother during their joint New York Times interview. She added that she loved learning “about the things you had never talked about before — for example, that all our favorite books were about orphans.”