Marian Anderson: My Lord, What a Morning

Context

On Easter Sunday (April 9) 1939, seventy-five thousand Americans gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington to hear the sound of freedom. Young and old, black and white, they braved the elements on an unseasonably cold April afternoon to listen to the soulful voice of Marian Anderson, a forty-three-year-old African American from Philadelphia who had been denied the right to sing at Constitution Hall because she was black.

One of the world’s most popular classical performers, Anderson had established her reputation in Europe during the early 1930s before returning to the United States in December 1935. Following a recital in Salzburg, Austria, in September 1935, the Italian maestro Arturo Toscanini exclaimed that Anderson’s contralto was a voice that “one is privileged to hear only once in a hundred years.” Many American concertgoers and critics came to hold her in similarly high regard, and in February 1936, Anderson interrupted a string of sold-out performances to sing at the White House, where she charmed President and Mrs. Roosevelt. None of this, however, seemed to carry any weight with the national leadership of the DAR, the venerable all-white heritage organization that owned and managed Constitution Hall, near the White House. Racial discrimination had long been a fact of life in the nation’s capital, and DAR leaders claimed that they were simply following tradition when they turned Anderson away. But this time the discrimination did not go unchallenged.

In mid-February 1939, several dozen progressive organizations in the Washington area formed the Marian Anderson Citizens Committee, a broad-based civil rights coalition determined to overturn the DAR’s decision. Spurred by the public’s growing outrage, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR on February 27, ensuring an ever-widening controversy and provoking a national press debate on the compatibility of democracy and racial discrimination. For several weeks, the Marian Anderson Citizens Committee, working in close collaboration with NAACP leaders, Sol Hurok, and a number of black intellectuals and activists associated with Howard University, pressured the DAR to end the “white artists only” policy at Constitution Hall. But they were eventually forced to seek an alternative venue for Anderson’s performance. After an unsuccessful attempt to book the auditorium of Central High School, a segregated institution that had occasionally opened its doors to black groups on a limited basis, the committee and its allies reluctantly concluded that the only viable option was an outdoor concert.

By mid-March, Walter White had seized upon the idea of the Lincoln Memorial as “the most logical place” for Anderson’s concert. The logic of holding a gathering at the seventeen-year-old Memorial was not as obvious in 1939 as it would become later. Over the coming decades, the Memorial would host literally hundreds of mass meetings, including the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which drew a quarter of a million people to the west end of the National Mall. But the notion of holding a rally, a concert, or any other mass assemblage at the site was both novel and daring in 1939. The federal agencies in charge of the site, the National Park Service and the Department of the Interior, had never granted a permit for a large gathering at the Memorial, and the only black organization of any size to use the site was the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which had held a religious service there for two thousand people in 1926.

The choice of the Lincoln Memorial as the backdrop was a calculated gamble. The organizers could not be certain how the American public would respond to the juxtaposition of a black concert singer and a white Republican president from Illinois. Physically and aesthetically, the Memorial and the adjacent rectangular reflecting pool stretching eastward toward the Washington Monument represented a stunning site. But the political and cultural implications of staging a controversial concert on sacred ground were complex and potentially dangerous. The situation called for careful planning and just the right touches to ensure that the event communicated the right messages to the right people. With help from Secretary Ickes, who secured the president’s approval, the organizers announced to the world on March 30 that Marian Anderson would sing at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, April 9.

The organizers went to great lengths to ensure that the free, open-air concert would attract a large audience and that a number of dignitaries would be on hand to underscore the significance of the occasion. When Anderson arrived at the Memorial, she was stunned to learn that the platform from which she would sing contained two hundred seats reserved for Supreme Court justices, congressional leaders, cabinet officials, and other political and cultural luminaries. Even more shocking was the size of the crowd, the largest gathering since the Memorial’s opening in 1922.

As soon as Anderson, a solitary figure wrapped in a fur coat to block the cold wind and drizzle, strode to the bank of microphones and began to sing the words to “America,” it was obvious that an extraordinary event was unfolding. No one could have missed the symbolic irony of the opening lyrics: “My country ’tis of thee, / Sweet land of liberty.” The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking to an even-larger gathering at the Lincoln Memorial a quarter-century later, would turn to the same anthem in his “I Have a Dream” speech. For him, as for Anderson, the closing words of the opening stanza—“Let freedom ring”—paid tribute to an unrealized ideal, engaging the audience in an aspiring celebration of democratic nationalism.

With the throng standing in rapt attention, Anderson went on to sing Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria” and several spirituals, culminating with “Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen.” Following a thunderous final ovation, she tried to return the crowd’s affection: “I am overwhelmed.… I just can’t talk.” she explained. “I can’t tell you what you’ve done for me today. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.” Moments later she had to be rushed from the stage as thousands of well-wishers pressed forward to congratulate her. Taken into the recesses of the Memorial by security guards, she stood for a few minutes under Daniel Chester French’s towering sculpture of Lincoln before joining her mother and sisters in a rented limousine that whisked them to the private home where they would spend the night. That no hotel in the rigidly segregated capital city was willing to lift its color bar to accommodate the Andersons underscored the bittersweet character of the occasion.

The entire program, including a short intermission, lasted a mere half hour. In that brief space of time, Marian Anderson became an iconic figure, gaining a new life and identity. Already renowned as a singer, she became forever after a symbol of racial pride and democratic promise. “No one present at that moving performance ever forgot it,” the historian Constance McLaughlin Green wrote in 1967. One suspects that Anderson’s performance was only slightly less moving for those who listened to the live broadcast of the concert on the NBC radio network. In the days and weeks following the concert, millions more read about it in newspapers and magazines or watched the newsreel footage in movie houses. Most of the news coverage stressed Anderson’s humility and dignity as well as the restraint and respectability of the crowd that had gathered to hear her sing. Not everyone welcomed her rising fame, especially in the white South, where Jim Crow segregation was not only a hallowed folkway but also the law of the land. Still, for many Americans, Anderson had become a model of African American achievement. Among black Americans her image took on heroic proportions, while for many northern whites her perceived mode of striving became an attractive alternative to the exploits of more menacing figures such as the boxer Joe Louis, the actor Paul Robeson, and the labor leader A. Philip Randolph. Occupying the moral high ground in her struggle with the DAR and Jim Crow, she helped to reawaken the nation’s conscience and its commitment to the American creed of “liberty and justice for all.”