As her 42nd birthday approached in February 1939, things were looking rosy for the African American contralto Marian Anderson.
Now in her vocal prime, Anderson was an acclaimed and much sought-after recitalist on both the US and European circuits. Yet her rise to prominence had been blighted by the racist attitudes that she regularly encountered, particularly in her native country. In an era when segregation was widespread in America, hotels accepting reservations from Black people could be hard to find and many restaurants served only white diners.
Eleanor Roosevelt stages a protest
So when Constitution Hall in Washington, DC refused to host a concert by Anderson scheduled for 9 April that year – the venue had a whites-only policy for artists – the singer would not have found it in the least surprising. A growing number of Americans, however, viewed such exclusions as repulsive. Among them was Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of president Franklin D, and her indignation at Anderson’s debarment prompted immediate action.
‘I am in complete disagreement with the attitude taken in refusing Constitution Hall to a great artist,’ the First Lady wrote to the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), a patriotic group which owned the hall. ‘You had an opportunity to lead in an enlightened way and it seems to me that your organisation has failed.’ Roosevelt resigned her membership of DAR on 26 February, and set about mobilising support for Anderson’s concert to be mounted in another location.
A symbolic new venue
The First Lady's government connections helped. Before long, secretary of the interior Harold Ickes was charged with making the new concert happen, and an outdoor setting at the Lincoln Memorial on Washington’s National Mall was chosen. The setting was, as Ickes highlighted in a speech preceding Anderson’s 9 April appearance, acutely symbolic.
‘Today we stand reverently and humbly at the base of this memorial to the Great Emancipator,’ he said, ‘while glorious tribute is rendered to his memory by a daughter of the race from which he struck the chains of slavery.’
Anderson herself was trepidatious about the concert. She had never performed outdoors before, the weather was cold and violence by protestors was a possibility. In the event, she need not have worried.
When she stepped up to a nest of microphones to begin the concert, fur-coated against an April wind, a mixed-race audience of 75,000 thronged the National Mall, anticipating what a newsreel called ‘the voice acclaimed by many as the finest in a century’.
What did Marian Anderson sing at the symbolic 1939 Washington concert?
The concert lasted 25 minutes. Opening with ‘America’ (‘My Country, ‘Tis of Thee’), Anderson continued with the aria ‘O mio Fernando’ from Donizetti’s opera La Favorita and Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’. Three spirituals followed – ‘Gospel Train’, ‘Trampin’, and ‘My Soul Is Anchored in the Lord’ – with ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen’ rounding it all off as an encore.
‘I had become a symbol, representing my people’
Anderson’s performance made national and international headlines. The New York Times reported that an enthusiastic crowd ‘threatened to mob her’ after the concert, until police intervened. A radio audience of millions also listened to a live relay of the event, and a photo of Anderson performing with the mighty marbled statue of Abraham Lincoln in the background quickly gained iconic status.
In 2001, footage of the concert was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry, in recognition of the galvanizing effect which her appearance had exerted on civil rights awareness in America. Anderson herself was not by temperament a political activist, but the importance of the Lincoln Memorial concert did not escape her. ‘I could see that my significance as an individual was small in this affair’, she said later. ‘I had become, whether I liked it or not, a symbol, representing my people.’