April 9, 1939: Marian Anderson
At 5:00 PM on Easter Sunday, 1939, a mixed-race audience of 75,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to hear Marian Anderson sing. Five million more listened to the internationally acclaimed Black contralto on the radio. Photographs and newsreels of her performing in front of Lincoln’s statue became a symbol of the struggling civil rights movement. More modest than militant, she would shatter racial barriers in the arts.
April 9, 1939: It was the largest audience at the Lincoln Memorial until August 1963.
The daughter of an ice and coal peddler and a laundress, Anderson was born in Philadelphia in 1897, not 1902, the date she gave during her career. She started singing in a Baptist church children’s choir. She had no formal training until she was fifteen when the church raised money for lessons. She dropped out of high school to pursue music, not graduating until 1925. That year she won first place among 300 singers in a New York Philharmonic voice competition.
Despite her talent, Anderson struggled to find bookings in America and moved to Europe in 1929. Her mix of classical repertoire and spirituals met with enormous success. Hearing her in Salzburg, famed conductor Arturo Toscanini declared: “A voice like yours is heard once in a hundred years.”
When the admired singer returned to the US, she again confronted segregation. After a performance at Princeton’s McCarter Theater in 1937, Anderson was denied a room at the whites-only Nassau Inn. Albert Einstein’s invitation to stay in his home led to their lifelong friendship, the topic of My Lord, What a Night, Deborah Brevoort’s 2019 play.
That was also the title of Anderson’s memoir. She always included spirituals in her programs, along with oratorios, arias, lieder, in French, German, and Italian. “[Spirituals] are my own music,” she said. “I love them because they are truly spiritual . . . [inspiring] faith, simplicity, humility and hope.” She performed concerts because no opera would cast her.
In 1939 Howard University invited Anderson to Washington. Because the city was segregated, her hosts could not secure a venue. The DC Board of Education denied use of the 2000-seat whites-only Central High School auditorium. The Daughters of the American Revolution had a 4,000-seat theater in its national headquarters, Constitution Hall, but invoked a policy adopted in 1932 barring African American musicians from performing.
The DAR was established in 1890, following the centennial of George Washington’s 1789 inauguration and after the Sons of the American Revolution refused to admit women. Its first President General was Republican President Benjamin Harrison’s wife Caroline, who supported its mission of historic preservation. Because prospective members had to provide proof of an ancestor who had fought for independence, the DAR’s records became a women’s history archive.
Like American society, entertainment was regionally segregated. Southern theaters enforced separate entrances and segregated seating. In 1935, when Porgy and Bess, George Gershwin’s opera about Black life, was performed in Washington, its Black cast insisted that the National Theater integrate seating for one week.
The Hays Code banned movies with interracial sex. From 1915 into the 1950s, Hollywood appealed to Black audiences by producing “race movies,” with Black casts. In white films, Black actors played peripheral roles. When Gone with the Wind opened in December 1939, MGM held its premiere in Atlanta. Georgia insisted that Black actress Hattie McDaniel not attend. Clark Gable threatened to boycott until she convinced him to go.
In February 1940 McDaniel was the first African American to win an Academy Award. Voted Best Supporting Actress for playing an enslaved maid, she was praised and damned by the Black press. In 1954 Dorothy Dandridge was the first Black actor, male or female, nominated in the leading role category. No Black woman would win the Best Actress Oscar until Halle Berry in 2002.
When the DAR barred Anderson, Eleanor Roosevelt publicly resigned in her My Day column: “To remain a member implies approval of that action; therefore I am resigning.” Her actual letter continued, “You had an opportunity to lead in an enlightened way . . . your organization has failed.” Black novelist Zora Neale Hurston felt the First Lady had failed, by not also criticizing the school board. During the New Deal, District government and schools were controlled by Congressional Democrats.
Mrs. Roosevelt’s strongest ally in her husband’s cabinet was Harold Ickes, the Secretary of Interior. A progressive Republican and past president of the Chicago NAACP, he ended the Wilson administration’s segregation of government facilities and established a quota system for the Works Progress Administration to increase Black employment. Working with the NAACP’s Walter White, Ickes proposed that Anderson perform at the Lincoln Memorial.
Honorary sponsors of the “Freedom Concert” included cabinet members; Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes; Justice Hugo Black, a former Klan member; film stars Katharine Hepburn and Tallulah Bankhead; Bankhead’s father, who was Speaker of the House, and her Senator uncle, both staunch Alabama segregationists. Since Washington hotels and restaurants were segregated, Congresswoman Carolyn O’Day (D-NY) arranged private housing for Anderson and her party.
Secretary Ickes introduced Anderson: “In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free . . . Genius, like Justice, is blind . . . Genius has touched this woman, who, if it had not been for the great heart of Lincoln, would not be able to stand among us today as a free individual in a free land. Genius draws no color line.”
Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes and Marian Anderson.
Wearing a diva’s mink coat and feeling “a great wave of good-will,” Anderson opened with “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” She sang arias, classics, “America the Beautiful,” and spirituals. Two months later, she sang at the White House for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the first British monarchs to visit America. She had performed there at a 1936 dinner and would continue to do so in every administration. Anderson sang again at the Lincoln Memorial in 1952, at Ickes’ memorial service.
In 1943, Anderson performed at Constitution Hall in a concert for war relief. She accepted on the condition that the audience be “de-segregated.” In 1964 she launched her farewell tour there. After refusing its stage to Black pianist Hazel Scott in 1945, the DAR ignored NAACP pickets and a protest from Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce (R-CT), a DAR member. Its “white artists only” policy, also in place at the National Theater and Lisner Auditorium, was reversed in 1952. Arena Stage, which opened in 1950, was Washington’s first integrated theater.
The NAACP pickets DAR Headquarters, Washington, DC, 1945.
The DAR’s admission of a known Black member in 1977 made the front page of the New York Times. Its 1983 denial of Lena Ferguson, a retired Black school secretary, also made headlines. When the DC Council threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status, the DAR changed its bylaws. It has since worked to identify Black and Indigenous Americans who supported independence, including Mary Hemings Bell, who was enslaved by Thomas Jefferson. In 2019 it added its first Black board member.
More significantly, Anderson’s 1939 concert reclaimed the civil rights legacy of the Lincoln Memorial. Designed as a symbol of regional rather than racial reconciliation, thirty-six Doric columns represent the reunited states. The Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural are inscribed on its walls, not the Emancipation Proclamation.
Lincoln’s surviving son Robert attended its segregated dedication ceremony, on Memorial Day, 1922. Black guests were herded into the colored section, behind choice seats reserved for Confederate veterans. The only Black speaker, Tuskegee president Robert Moton, was not permitted to sit with other speakers. His remarks were censored, cutting his conclusion: “So long as any group within our nation is denied the full protection of the law, [Lincoln’s] . . . work [remains] unfinished [and this Memorial is] but a hollow mockery.”
In June 1947, Harry Truman addressed ten thousand NAACP members at the Memorial. A generation before John Kennedy repeated the phrase, Truman called civil rights a moral imperative for America. On the third anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, in 1957, Martin Luther King Jr., A. Phillip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Roy Wilkins organized a “Prayer Pilgrimage” at the Memorial. The demonstration drew 25,000 participants. In August 1963, Anderson joined King and 250,000 people for the March on Washington. In a hat and white gloves, she sang “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”
1963 March on Washington; the gentleman with glasses may be Bayard Rustin.
Anderson finally made her opera debut in 1955, when she was past her vocal prime, becoming the first Black singer to have a principal role at the Metropolitan Opera. She invited Eleanor Roosevelt to attend. She sang at the inaugurations of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy and served as a goodwill ambassador for the State Department and a member of the US delegation to the United Nations. President Johnson gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1978, she was in the first class of artists to receive a Kennedy Center Honor.
With Eleanor Roosevelt in Tokyo, 1953.
Anderson retired in 1968, at age 71. She lived on a farm in Danbury, Connecticut, with her architect husband, Orpheus Fisher. The couple met in high school and married in 1943. Childless and widowed, she died at her nephew’s home in 1993. Soprano Leontyne Price, one of the artists who benefited from Anderson’s pathbreaking, hailed “her example of professionalism, uncompromising standards, . . . persistence, resiliency, and undaunted spirit.” Anderson supported racial justice with her singing voice rather than political advocacy. “I did not feel I was designed for hand-to-hand combat.”
PHOTO CREDITS: Library of Congress, National Archives, White House Historical Association;1945 protest: https://www.flickr.com/photos/washington_area_spark/34561780073
SOURCES:
Hanif Abdurraqib, “Perfect Pitch,” Smithsonian (January-February 2023), https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/marian-anderson-took-world-storm-180981311/
Alan Kozinn, “Marian Anderson Is Dead at 96; Singer Shattered Racial Barriers,” New York Times (April 9, 1993), https://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/09/obituaries/marian-anderson-is-dead-at-96-singer-shattered-racial-barriers.html
Peter Marks, “Albert Einstein and Marian Anderson Were Good Friends; New Play . . .” Washington Post (October 7, 2021), https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/theater_dance/einstein-fords-anderson-woolly-mammoth-teenage-dick/2021/10/07/6b0ddc36-2719-11ec-8831-a31e7b3de188_story.html
Bethany Nagle, “A Friendly Voice: Marian Anderson and White House History,” The White House Historic Association (May 2017), https://www.whitehousehistory.org/a-friendly-voice
Sandra Tatman, “Fisher, Orpheus Hodge (1900-1986), Architect,” https://www.americanbuildings.org/pab/app/ar_display.cfm/1183414\
https://blog.dar.org/embracing-our-enduring-bond-marian-anderson
Courtland Milloy, “A War Without End: The DAR and the 40-Year Fight to Honor Lena Ferguson,” Washington Post (July 5, 2022), https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/07/05/daughters-of-the-american-revolution-lena-ferguson-marian-anderson-hazel-scott/
National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, Forgotten Patriots: African American and American Indian Patriots in the Revolutionary War: A Guide to Service, Sources and Studies (2008). www.dar.org
DC Historic Preservation Office, “Civil Rights Tour: Protest: The Lincoln Memorial,” DC Historical Sites, https://historicsites.dcpreservation.org/items/show/948.
Harold Holzer, “An American Icon that Almost Wasn’t,” Wall Street Journal (February 16-17, 2019), https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-americanicon-that-almost-wasnt-11550261017