NEW YORK (AP) — Lena Horne, whose signature song was Stormy Weather, was remembered at her funeral on Friday as a shy girl from Brooklyn who fought racism for decades to emerge as a world-class singer and social activist.

“She was so many ideas existing all at the same time in the same space and they were all conflicting and they were all true,” her granddaughter, screenwriter Jenny Lumet, told hundreds of mourners at the Church of St Ignatius Loyola in Manhattan.

They included fellow entertainers Chita Rivera, Diahann Carroll, Dionne Warwick, Cicely Tyson and Vanessa Williams.

Horne, who died Sunday at 92, was one of the first black performers hired to sing with Charlie Barnet’s white orchestra in the early 1940s, playing the Copacabana nightclub in New York City. When she signed with MGM, she was one of the rare black actors to have a contract with a major Hollywood studio. In 1943, MGM lent Horne to 20th Century Fox to play the lead role in the all-black movie musical Stormy Weather. Her rendition of the title song became a major hit — reflecting the ups and downs of her life, which included a second marriage to Lennie Hayton, a Jewish musician working for MGM with whom she shared the social pressures of being an interracial couple.

Horne plunged into activism after 1945, when she performed at an Army base and saw German prisoners of war sitting in front while black American soldiers were consigned to the rear. Aging members of the so-called Tuskegee Airmen, a group of black World War II pilots who broke racial barriers, attended the funeral. Among them was Roscoe Brown Jr, who commanded an Air Force squadron and now directs the Centre for Urban Education Policy at the City University of New York.

“This wonderful, beautiful lady, Lena Horne, came to visit us,” he told mourners. “She sang, she talked with us and she made us all her boyfriends.

“The men took her picture “and put it on our barracks, on our planes, and she became our pinup girl,” he said.

During the two-hour funeral, former New York City Mayor David Dinkins and US Rep. John Lewis, also delivered eulogies for a woman who was blacklisted in the 1950s for her activism and unable to perform.

In Washington on Friday, US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, paid tribute to Horne by introducing a bipartisan Senate resolution that passed unanimously, recognising the Brooklyn native’s legacy as a Hollywood trailblazer and civil rights activist.

Horne’s funeral was held in the Upper East Side church where she brought her family each Easter for years.

Jenny Lumet smiled as she recalled being “a small child loved by this woman”.

“Her beauty was so deep you could swim in it,” with hands “like orchids or lilies” that were graced by “all these gold bracelets so she’d jingle like a cat when she walked, so if I was in her stuff, you always knew if she was coming ’cause of all her … her bling!”

Standing at the altar, Broadway star Audra McDonald sang Amazing Grace over Horne’s white-and-gold-draped casket.