The Lena Horne: First Broadway theater to be named after a Black woman

For the first time, a Broadway theater will be named in honor of a Black woman.

The Nederlander Organization said Thursday that it would rename its Brooks Atkinson Theater in New York’s famed theater district after Lena Horne.

The singer and dancer, who was also a Broadway performer and Civil Rights activist, died in 2010 at 92.

Nederlander Organization President James Nederlander told The New York Times that the move is “overdue.”

“This felt really right,” Nederlander said.

A Nederlander Organization representative confirmed the Times’s report to ITK. The group told the paper that it expected to make the name change official in the fall, when new signage is available.

The move to rename the Atkinson theater — currently named after a New York Times theater critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist — comes following an agreement announced last year by three of Broadway’s major landlords and Black Theater United to recognize a Black artist at at least one of their performance spaces.

Two theaters had already announced that playwright August Wilson and actor James Earl Jones would be among those honored with theaters named after them.