Caterina Jarboro

Caterina Jarboro was born Katherine Lee Yarborough on the twenty-fourth of July, 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina — arriving into the world only months before the 1898 Wilmington massacre reshaped the city of her birth. The daughter of a Black father and a Native American mother, she carried a heritage that would later be seized upon, and misread, by the institutions she sought to enter.

Drawn early to music, she made her way north and then across the Atlantic, refining her voice in Europe. She adopted the Italianate name Caterina Jarboro and, around 1930, made her operatic debut in the title role of Verdi's Aida at the Puccini Theatre in Milan, later appearing as Sélika in Meyerbeer's L'Africaine. Europe gave her the stage that her own country had withheld.

Her historic homecoming came on the twenty-second of July, 1933, when impresario Alfredo Salmaggi presented her as Aida at the New York Hippodrome before a vast audience. That night she became the first Black woman to sing a leading role with an otherwise all-white opera company in the United States — a full twenty-two years before Marian Anderson's Metropolitan Opera debut. Critics praised her vivid dramatic presence and her flawless Italian diction.

She continued to concertize, reaching Town Hall and Carnegie Hall in the 1940s before retiring in the 1950s, and died in Manhattan on the thirteenth of August, 1986. May the door she opened, and the voice that opened it, be honored for as long as the music lasts.