Just across the street from the White House in Washington D.C. stands “Constitution Hall.” This grand neo-classical building seats 3,702 people, including 2,208 in the tiers and 1,234 on the orchestra level. The hall has 52 boxes, each containing five seats, separating the orchestra from the tiers, including one Presidential box. Constitution Hall was home to the National Symphony Orchestra and the city's principal venue for touring classical music soloists and orchestras.
The hall was opened in 1929 and owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). In 1939, the famous impresario, Sol Hurok, sponsored Contralto Marian Anderson, an African American, and tried to rent Constitution Hall to feature her talent. Hurok was told there were “no dates available.” Washington D.C. in 1939 was still a segregated city, and the Constitution Hall would not allow a Black performer.
In 1935, the hall instated a new clause in its policies: “Concert by white artists only.” Hurok would have walked away with the response he’d received, but a rival manager asked about renting the hall for the same dates and was told they were open. The hall’s director told Hurok the truth, even yelling before slamming down the phone, “No Negro will ever appear in this hall while I am manager.”
The public was outraged, famous musicians protested, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) very publicly. Roosevelt, along with Hurok and Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), encouraged Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to arrange a free open-air concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for Easter Sunday.
Anderson was concerned about the public reaction but responded by saying, “I said yes, but the yes did not come easily or quickly. I don’t like a lot of show, and one could not tell in advance what direction the affair would take. I studied my conscience. As I thought further, I could see that my significance as an individual was small in this affair. I had become, whether I like it or not, a symbol, representing my people."
On April 9, Marian sang before 75,000 people and millions of radio listeners. She began the performance with a dignified and stirring rendition of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." Two months later, in conjunction with the 30th NAACP conference in Richmond, Virginia, Eleanor Roosevelt gave a speech on national radio (NBC and CBS) and presented Anderson with the 1939 Spingarn Medal for distinguished achievement.
By 1939, Marian Anderson was already a famous singer and had studied vocal music in Europe on a fellowship from the Rosenwald Fund. They provided Anderson with $1500 to go to Berlin to study music after hearing her debut concert in Chicago in 1929. By 1930, she began her first European tour followed by a second in 1933. Anderson noted that in Europe she did not encounter the discrimination and segregation that made it difficult to conduct her career in the United States.
While in Europe Anderson performed in all the major cities and their grandest music halls. In Scandinavia, the audiences were described as having “Marian Fever” because they loved her so much. She was received broadly in Eastern Europe and Russia. She quickly became a favorite of many conductors and composers of major European orchestras. During a 1935 tour in Salzburg, the conductor Arturo Toscanini told her she had a voice "heard once in a hundred years."
In the mid-1930s Sol Hurok convinced Anderson to return to the United States where he became her manager. She traveled throughout the US and Europe again winning praise and admiration for her stupendous singing voice. But Anderson's accomplishments as a singer did not make her immune to Jim Crow laws in the 1930s. Although she gave approximately seventy recitals a year in the United States, Anderson was still turned away by some American hotels and restaurants.
In the South, she often stayed with friends. Simple tasks such as arranging for laundry, taking a train, or eating at a restaurant were often difficult. She would take meals in her room and travel in drawing rooms on night trains. She said: “If I were inclined to be combative, I suppose I might insist on making an issue of these things. But that is not my nature, and I always bear in mind that my mission is to leave behind me the kind of impression that will make it easier for those who follow.”
By the 1940s she insisted on “vertical” seating in segregated cities; meaning black audience members would be allotted seats in all parts of the auditorium. It was the first time Black people would sit in the orchestra section. By 1950, she would refuse to sing where the audience was segregated. Anderson would quietly but firmly stand for equal treatment for African Americans.
She forged a friendship with Albert Einstein, a champion of racial tolerance, who hosted Anderson on many occasions. The first was in 1937 when she was denied a hotel room while performing at Princeton University. Einstein's first hosting of Anderson became the subject of a play, "My Lord, What a Night," in 2021. She last stayed with him months before he died in 1955.
On January 7, 1955, Anderson became the first African American to sing with the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In 1957, she sang for President Dwight D. Eisenhower's inauguration and toured India and the Far East as a goodwill ambassador through the U.S. State Department and the American National Theater and Academy. After that, President Eisenhower appointed her a delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
On January 20, 1961, she sang for President John F. Kennedy's inauguration, and in 1962 she performed for President Kennedy and other dignitaries in the East Room of the White House and toured Australia. She was active in supporting the civil rights movement during the 1960s. She performed benefit concerts in aid of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Congress of Racial Equality.
Then in August 1963, alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., she sang at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. That same year, she received one of the newly reinstituted Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is awarded for "especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interest of the United States, World Peace or cultural or other significant public or private endeavors."
In 1964, Marian Anderson launched a farewell tour, planning to retire from public performance. Not coincidentally, the tour began in Washington D.C. at Constitution Hall on October 24, 1964, and ended at Carnegie Hall in New York the next April.
Anderson and her husband, Orpheus Fisher, had purchased a farm in Connecticut in 1940, where they lived for decades. In 1986, her husband died, and she continued to live on the farm, which had been named the “Marianna Farm,” when not traveling. In 1992, Anderson relocated to the home of her nephew, conductor James DePreist, in Portland, Oregon. She died there on April 8, 1993, of congestive heart failure, at the age of 96.
Marian Anderson’s life and work have been an inspiration to all young Black musicians who have aspired to share their talent with the world, despite obstacles that social norms might impose. She overcame them with grace and poise, and never allowed mistreatment to derail her or dissuade her from her goal.
“When I sing, I don't want them to see that my face is black. I don't want them to see that my face is white. I want them to see my soul. And that is colorless.”
Marian Anderson
Listen to the angelic voice of Marian Anderson