Marian Anderson

Marian Anderson was born in Philadelphia on the twenty-seventh of February 1897, the eldest of three daughters of a coal and ice dealer and a former Virginia schoolteacher. She sang in the Union Baptist Church choir from age six and was trained as a contralto by Mary Saunders Patterson and then by Giuseppe Boghetti through her late teens and twenties.

She was denied admission to the Philadelphia Music Academy in 1914 on the explicit grounds of her race. She debuted at New York's Town Hall in 1924 (the recital was poorly attended and unfavorably reviewed). She spent the next twelve years building her career in Europe — where racial barriers operated differently — through extended stays in London, Berlin, and the Scandinavian capitals. By the mid-1930s she was the most internationally acclaimed African American concert artist of her generation. The conductor Arturo Toscanini called her voice "such as one hears once in a hundred years."

In January 1939 the Daughters of the American Revolution denied her permission to perform at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., on the grounds of her race. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her DAR membership in protest. Anderson performed an open-air recital at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, the ninth of April 1939, before an audience of seventy-five thousand people on the National Mall and a national radio audience of millions. The concert is one of the founding civic events of the modern American civil-rights movement.

She made her Metropolitan Opera debut on the seventh of January 1955 in Verdi's Un ballo in maschera — the first African American to perform as a soloist at the Metropolitan Opera. She was fifty-seven.

She died at her niece's home in Portland, Oregon, on the eighth of April 1993, age ninety-six.

She is honored here as the contralto whose 1939 concert reshaped American civic memory.