And the singer and actress Eartha Kitt has died at the age of eighty-one. She was blacklisted in 1968 after she spoke out against the Vietnam War at a White House luncheon hosted by Lady Bird Johnson. When Johnson asked her about the Vietnam War, Kitt replied, “You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. They rebel in the street. They don’t want to go to school because they’re going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.” The First Lady reportedly burst into tears. For four years afterward, Kitt performed almost exclusively overseas and was investigated by the FBI and CIA.

Eartha Kitt: “My greatest challenge was to be able to survive in the business and to be able to survive according to what I was doing, not according to what other people were doing. And therefore, I just stuck to my own guns, and I think that’s one of the ways I have survived, is that I didn’t follow the herd. I followed my own path.”