Marian Anderson: My Lord, What a Morning

About the Author

Born in Philadelphia in 1897, Marian Anderson grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood that exemplified both the strengths and the weaknesses of inner-city life. While her childhood was marked by poverty and the early death of her father, she enjoyed the benefits of being raised in a close-knit extended family that nurtured her personal and musical development. Both sides of her family had migrated to Pennsylvania from Virginia in the early 1890s.

All four of Anderson’s grandparents had lived as slaves, but in Philadelphia her parents and grandparents found a measure of freedom and stability anchored in religious faith. Followed closely by two talented younger sisters, Anderson joined the Union Baptist Church junior choir at the age of six and eventually became the pride of the congregation. As an adolescent, she became the leading soloist of the People’s Chorus, a revered institution among black Philadelphians. By the time she had reached the age of eighteen, Union Baptist and the surrounding community were raising funds for her musical education. The funds raised were modest, and Anderson was shunned by the first vocal school that she unwittingly tried to desegregate. But by 1917 her prospects for a professional career were brightening, and she had reason to hope that someday she would be able to share her talent with the wider world.

Anderson took her first trip to the South in December 1917, when at the age of twenty she sang before a mixed but segregated audience in Savannah, Georgia. During the mid-1920s, annual southern tours took her to as many as nine states and as far away as Florida. Over time she developed a loyal following among southern whites as well as blacks, but her growing popularity did not protect her from the humiliations of Jim Crow travel and segregated concert halls.

In late 1927, Anderson found a temporary refuge in London, joining the growing number of other black musicians studying and performing in Europe. She returned to the United States in October 1928, but in June 1930 a Rosenwald Fellowship funded an extended visit to Berlin, where she honed her skills as a classical singer of German lieder. By 1931, the escalating tensions of Weimar Germany had driven her to Scandinavia, where she remained for nearly three years. A wildly successful concert tour in 1933–1934 made her a celebrity throughout Scandinavia, and during the following year her fame spread to France, England, Austria, and beyond—especially after she signed a contract with the legendary promotional agent Sol Hurok in the fall of 1934.

In 1935 Anderson returned to the United States, where she confronted the ambiguous realities of a depression-ravaged nation that had found a measure of hope in New Deal reforms. These ambiguities were especially apparent in matters of race, and nowhere was this more evident than in the nation’s capital, where a rigid color line coexisted with the iconography of democracy and freedom. In mid-February 1936, Anderson sang before a mixed audience in the auditorium of an all-black Washington high school, and a few days later she entertained Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House. Over the next three years, Anderson performed all across the nation to considerable acclaim, but her manager, Sol Hurok, had great difficulty arranging appropriate venues in the Jim Crow South and in Washington. In January 1939, Hurok’s unsuccessful attempt to book an Anderson concert in Constitution Hall, the city’s only large auditorium, provoked a national controversy that highlighted the racist conservatism of both the DAR and the nation’s capital.

From 1939 until her death, Anderson maintained an active role in the civil rights movement. Beginning with her Easter Sunday concert, a series of events and honors reinforced her visibility as a symbol of democratic and racial promise. In July of 1939, at the NAACP’s annual convention, Eleanor Roosevelt presented her with the organization’s prestigious Spingarn Medal for outstanding achievement. In January of 1943, a mural commemorating her Lincoln Memorial concert was installed at the Department of the Interior. Later that year, she finally appeared at Constitution Hall at a war-relief benefit concert, and in March of 1953 she sang once more at Constitution Hall, this time to an integrated audience. Her celebrated appearance as Ulrica in the Metropolitan Opera’s 1955 performance of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera broke the Met’s long-standing color bar. In 1958 Anderson was appointed as an American delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, and in 1961 she was invited to sing at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963. Her farewell tour began at Constitution Hall in October 1964, three months after the signing of the Civil Rights Act, and ended at Carnegie Hall on Easter Sunday 1965, three weeks after the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march.

In her twenty-five years of retirement, Anderson made only sporadic stage appearances, but she remained in the public eye as a philanthropist and as an enduring symbol of dignity and courage. When she died in 1993, at the age of ninety-six, there was an outpouring of tribute and affection as Americans of all races and political persuasions lamented the passing of a woman of unrivaled talent and character.