Marian Anderson - The Lady from Philadelphia

An acclaimed African-American contralto, Marian Anderson was barred from singing in Constitution Hall in 1939. She sang at the Lincoln Memorial instead. The concert was broadcast around the country -- and also heard by a young Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Fair Dowdy and a chalk reporting And today we're
gonna be talking about a famous singer. But we're gonna
start by talking about a famous speech, one of the

(00:23):
most famous speeches in history. It took place August nineteen
sixty three. It's Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech.
Of course, that was made on the steps of the
Lincoln Memorial. But more than twenty years before that, ten
year old Martin Luther King had been affected by another
Lincoln Memorial event, one that had been also covered nationally,

(00:44):
broadcast coast to coast by NBC Radio, covered in all
the newspapers, a really big event, and that was the
concert of African American Contralto singer Marian Anderson. And she
had opened her performance by singing America and then Donna's
Eddy and Ave Maria and Spiritual is the selection of spirituals.

(01:04):
To this utterly ecstatic crowd, they were just thrilled to
see her saying an internationally renowned singer and see her
saying there on the National Mall seventy five thousand people
were actually there, and that was the largest group to
gather at the Lincoln Memorial since Lindbergh's appearance there in
nineteen It was a huge event that that concert was

(01:26):
actually a result of earlier discrimination. The Daughters of the
American Revolution had refused to allow Anderson, who was by
that point an internationally acclaimed singer, to perform at d
c's Constitution Hall. So in protest, first Lady Eleanor Roosevelt
resigned from the d a R and arranged an alternate
venue for Anderson's performance, the National Mall. So with a

(01:48):
backstory like that, in a voice like Anderson's, the Easter
nineteen thirty nine performance proved to be a landmark moment
for the early civil rights movement, and one that undoubtedly
affected young Martin Luther King. Yeah. We actually have a
quote from him at age fifteen. So, just a few
years after this concert by Marion Anderson, Martin Luther King
entered a speaking contest and he noted the performance and

(02:11):
the inequalities that it had yet to address. In the speech,
he wrote, here's what he had to say. She's sang
is never before with tears in her eyes when the
words of America, And nobody knows the trouble I've seen
rang out over that great gathering. There was a hush
on the sea of uplifted faces, black and white, and
a new baptism of liberty, equality and fraternity. That was

(02:34):
a touching tribute. But miss Anderson may not as yet
spend the night in any good hotel in America. So
who was Marion Anderson? How did she wind up singing
on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in front of
this crowd of seventy thousand people? And what did she
think of her her sort of unwilling or reluctant role

(02:55):
as a civil rights figure. Well, we're gonna get to that,
but first we're gonna start with her childhood. She was
born in Philadelphia in eighteen nine, and she was the
eldest of three girls. Her mother had trained as a
school teacher in Virginia and her father worked delivering coal
and ice. And Anderson started singing at a really early age.
She joined the junior choir of the Union Baptist Church

(03:17):
at age six, and she actually got in trouble back
then because she would drown out all the other kids
in her class. So in class she'd said as close
as she could to the music room so that she
could overhear the songs being taught through the wall. So
really obsessed with music, she would when she finally would
get to music class from her her other studies, she
would already know all the songs. She would have memorized

(03:38):
them already. But she was also interested in piano and violin.
She bought a used violin herself by saving up money
from scrubbing stats, and supposedly was not very great at violin.
She realized that was not her instrument, but still practiced
really hard at it. And this was kind of an
interesting time in classical music, one that we need to

(03:58):
discuss a little bit before we we can really understand
how Marian came to be what she was. But it
was a time that seemed a little more welcoming to
African Americans, time when classical music seemed a little more
accessible than it had in the past. Because just a
few years before Anderson was born, and Tonin Dvorjac had
announced that African Americans would be able to attend the

(04:21):
National Conservatory free of admission. And he made that decision
because he thought that spirituals and American Indian music was
sort of the way that American composition was headed. That
would be the major influence in the future of American music.
So he thought that people with fewer privileges should be

(04:42):
able to train up to be a part of that future.
And Anderson certainly seemed like she would be part of
that future. She had promised. She joined the people's course
at Church of the Crucifixion at age eight and had
to stand on a chair to see the conductor. So
that's how young she was compared to everyone else. And
it was around this time that paper started advertising her

(05:03):
church concerts to shows by quote the baby contralto. Yeah,
and that was the first little contralto nickname she had.
But I think it's it's funny to imagine an eight
year old with a contralto. In case anybody doesn't know,
that's one of the lower the lower registers for women singers,
So imagine an eight year old with a very powerful,

(05:23):
slightly low voice. But must have been surprising two people. Yeah,
and impressive for sure even then. But in nineteen o nine,
Marian's family sort of underwent some major trouble. Her father
had a head injury at work and after a month
of illness related to this injury. He died at age
thirty four, and that left Marian's mother having to go

(05:45):
back to work. Unfortunately, she couldn't teach, even though that's
what she had done in Virginia, because she didn't have
the proper certification to teach in Pennsylvania. So she did
laundry and cleaning and sewing. And it also called Marian
to have to go to work herself, drop out of
high school and help support the family, and she did
that mostly with menial work as well, helping out her

(06:06):
mother with cleaning and and stuff like that, but also
occasionally taking on gig at a small concert, something something
to make a little money off of her singing, and
she got help with that too. People who had heard
her sing they weren't about to let her slip off
into a life of manual labor. So she continued to
sing with the People's Chorus and Union Baptist Church, often

(06:29):
filling in for soloists and sometimes even helping fill out
the tenor section. As Sarah indicated before another another great
example of her reign. She had three octaves actually, so
she could go from covering for the tenor section to
singing soprano. So she studied with a teacher, Mary Saunders Patterson,
who would often waive her lesson fees, and she was

(06:50):
supported by the Union Baptist folks who basically took up
a collection for her in order to send her to school. Yeah,
they wanted to to see her go somewhere. They actually
thought that her voice was a gift from God and
it shouldn't be wasted. So you'd think that such a
talented young woman who was the pride of her community
and had all of these supporters would would be able
to get into a conservatory, be able to get some

(07:13):
professional training. So with money in hand, she actually applied
to a local conservatory in nineteen fourteen, but had this
terrible experience there. The receptionists made her wait until everyone
in line behind her had been served, and then finally,
when she was the last person in the room, the
woman told her we don't take colored and dismissed her

(07:34):
without even giving her a chance to sing. But she
still managed to continue her training even though she couldn't
get into a school like this, She went back to
high school instead with the support of her church. So
she had that kind of hoping that she'd be able
to get a higher paying day job eventually to continue
her singing, and then the churches. Marian Anderson's Future Fund

(07:56):
also helped her continue funding these private lessons, and by
the time she started touring regionally, momentum around her was
really really building. Finally, yeah, we mentioned people from where
she was locally collecting money from her, but at a
concert for the National Association of Negro Musicians convention in Chicago,
someone in the audience actually called for a collection for

(08:16):
her there too. She eventually applied and was accepted to Yale,
but she still couldn't attend due to the price. Meanwhile, though,
the principle of her high school, Dr. Lucy Wilson, kept
working with Marian and introduced her to Giuseppe Boghetti, a
well known voice teacher, and he remembers their first meeting
in this way quote at the end of a long,

(08:37):
hard day, when I was weary of singing and singers,
and when a tall, calm girl poured out deep river
in the twilight and made me cry. Yeah. And so
he was really affected by this young woman and her voice,
and he cleared his schedule for her, and he was
pretty frank with her too. He told her, I will
need only two years with you. After that you will

(08:59):
be able ago anywhere and sing for anybody. And that
really proved to be true. But they started intensive training
and she she did have a lot to learn. She
had a great natural gift and she was really good
at what she had been singing, which was spirituals and gospel,
but she needed to hone her foreign language diction to
be able to sing art songs and sing arias from operas,

(09:22):
and to practice the style for that type of singing.
She made her more formally. Yeah, he trained her formally,
and so she practicing all of this all the while
with him, she toured black colleges and churches on the
East Coast, and in nine nineteen two she also started
making recordings with Joseph Pasternach, who was the conductor of

(09:44):
the Philharmonic Society of Philadelphia. And interestingly, these were the
first recordings African American concert artist recordings of spirituals for
a major label. And um Marian has so many firsts
that were not going to be able to acknowledge all
of them. But I thought that was that was an
interesting recording milestone. But with all the success disappointment still

(10:09):
had a surprisingly big effect on her. Yes, probably the
worst one came in April nine four, when she made
her town Hall, New York City debut to a nearly
empty house. The reviews were really bad, and after that
she had to take time off to reconsider her career
before she finally decided to jump back in for a

(10:30):
smash collaboration with the Philharmonic Society of Philadelphia. So she
came back, but she was really down. There ended up
being a bump in the road, but she she just
had to think about whether this was something she really
wanted to pursue. But by she was confident enough with
her abilities and a strong enough singer that but Getty
secretly entered her name into this contest with a very

(10:53):
grand prize. Indeed, the winner would appear as a soloist
with the New York Philharmonic, And as you can imagine,
it was competitive. There were three hundred singers trying to
get this prize, and by the time Anderson appeared, the
judges had already heard fifty singers that day. So I
guess imagine those early American Idol tryouts. They're probably pretty

(11:15):
burned out, except they were cutting people off with a buzzer. Yes,
they were cutting people off in the middle of the buzzer.
So she was seeing this before she went up and performed,
and was just dreading she would go out there, pour
her heart out, sing her beautiful song and be cut
off in the middle by the buzzer. But they listened
the whole way through. They called her back, they had
her sing a few different times, and she ended up

(11:35):
winning the competition and performed before a crowd of seven thousand,
five hundred people. So after that town hall debacle, this
was a real triumph and really gave her the confidence
to move on to the next step in her career right,
and that next step was to head to Europe. There
were fewer racial barriers. They're more of an opportunity to

(11:57):
learn languages of classical music, including friend Italian and German,
as well as European vocal style. So it just seemed
to make sense that this was this was the next
logical step for her. So in the fall of nine
seven she left for her first trip, and she spent
the next several years going back and forth between there
in the United States, and at first she mostly studied
in Germany. She studied language addiction there and toward in Scandinavia,

(12:21):
and the Scandinavians really loved that her name was Anderson
just because Scandina. Yeah, the newspapers there talked about quote
maryan fever. So she was really big there. But eventually
she was touring the whole continent and Asia as well.
In nineteen thirty four she made her Paris debut, and
in the Soviet Union she featured spirituals and songs like
ave Maria. She just changed the titles to suit censors

(12:44):
a little bit. They didn't want overtly religious songs, but
those were the songs. She wasn't willing to not sing spirituals.
That's what she had always done, so just changed things
around a little bit and made a few adjustments. But
the government there actually liked her so much they arranged
for recordings to inspire Soviet young people in the Soviet Union,
which is is really bizarre if you think about it,

(13:06):
that this, uh, this young woman from Philadelphia would be
a model for Soviet youths. But there you go. So
during all this touring now she also obviously came into
contact with a lot of great European composers and performers,
and directors, and she met Finnish composer Jean Sibelius for instance,
and Arturo Toscanini perhaps gave her one of her most

(13:29):
famous compliments, which is, yours is a voice such as one.
Here's only once in a hundred years. And um, in
some of the things I read about Anderson, a lot
of people said, we're not anywhere close to that hundred
years being up quite yet. So it still holds true today,
still holds true in in some people's opinion. But by

(13:49):
the mid nineteen thirties, obviously Europe was getting to not
be such a hospitable place for Anderson anymore. So she
started reconsidering where her career was going to go, and
at one point she was even invited to Thing in Berlin,
where of course she had performed extensively in the nineteen twenties,
but organizers called it off when they heard that she

(14:11):
was not quote one hundred percent Arian. Surprise. UM, so
she just starts looking at at different options. It's time
to move on in her career yet again. So it
was time to come home for an extended stay. And
fortunately her success in Europe meant that she could bring
on a better manager because While her European tours had
been a grand success, her state side manager, who was

(14:33):
Arthur Judson, had been pretty lackluster. He didn't book much
for her, and he even tried to convince her to
be a soprano and pursue the role of Aida, which
was a traditionally black song role. But at one point
she got so fed up with him that she booked
it for Sweden and actually stayed abroad there for two years.
Ditched or manager, and she was basically hiding from him.

(14:55):
But in Paris she had met impresario soul Horrick and
he saw in her away from Judson by guaranteeing at
least fifteen stateside concerts with a five hundred dollar fee
per concert. So she was all about that. She was like, okay,
let's do it. And her homecoming concert was scheduled for
December thirtieth, ninety five at New York City's Town Hall,

(15:15):
the site of her first major failure that we mentioned.
And to further complicate those bad memories that she must
have already had of the place, she also had just
broken her ankle, so she had this cast on her foot,
but she had to do the show anyway. Leaning against
the piano, wearing a long, elegant dress to cover the cast,
standing on one foot. I mean, can you imagine how

(15:36):
much somebody like this too, when when you're gonna hear
her voice later in the podcast, somebody who clearly has
to put so much energy and power into her voice
standing on one foot, that would be pretty agonizing. But
this time her performance at the town Hall is a
huge success. The New York Times says there was no
doubt of it. She was mistress of all she surveyed,

(15:59):
so big success in New York. She's got this good
tour going on, making a lot of money. Actually, in
nineteen thirty eight she made a quarter of a million dollars.
So just to give you an idea of how successful
she really was. It wasn't just good reviews. That's the
equivalent of three point seven million dollars today, So I

(16:20):
mean a quarter of a million sound it still sounds
pretty I know. So she was she was doing very
well for herself and as an artist. It seemed like
she was ready to perform in the nation's capital, to
perform in d C. And Herrick wanted her to debut
at Constitution Hall, which was really the only venue that

(16:42):
could contain her many many fans. It was the biggest
venue in d C. But in the early nineteen thirties,
the d a R Daughters of the American Revolution, which
owned Constitution Hall, had instituted this policy against black performers.
They had originally allowed blacker formers, but they thought it
attracted too much of a black audience, so they made

(17:05):
a just blanket policy against black performers at Constitution Hall.
So Para tries to get them to maybe change their
roles for Anderson, and she is such a huge celebrated star.
But even under pressure from him and from the n
double a CP and from Howard University, the d a
R refuses to back down from their policy. And unfortunately,

(17:28):
the next biggest venue in town, which was a local
white high school, was also out of the question because
the school board refused to allow Anderson to perform there.
So enter Eleanor Roosevelt. She was a member of the
d a R, probably its most prominent member. She resigned publicly,
wrote the scathing letter to them, and started working with

(17:49):
her husband, who was the president at the time, and
others to book Anderson at the National Mall. So if
you if you can't perform in the biggest concert venue,
perform at the most high profile place in the national
capital instead, and she did just that, and the Boy
Scouts handed out programs to a mixed race audience that
was there in attendance, and she was introduced by the

(18:11):
Secretary of the Interior, who introduced her by saying, quote,
in this great auditorium under the sky, all of us
are free. And after that introduction, she started her performance
with My country tis of Bee And here's what it
sounded like. That clip is pretty moving just listening to it,

(19:10):
but you can also see video footage of it, and
at the end she just breaks into this huge smile.
She's clearly aware of what an effect it had, and
looking back, it's clearly a moment of activism. It seems
like a preface to the civil rights movement that really
doesn't kick off for a few more years. But at
the time, Anderson herself didn't really identify as an activist.

(19:33):
She wasn't really interested in doing that or or being
that person. In fact, she had spent most of her
career avoiding racially charged situations altogether. She would take her
meals in hotel rooms to avoid uncomfortable situations at restaurants.
She'd sometimes have her white accompanis fetch her food from
a restaurant that she wasn't able to go into. And

(19:56):
she'd even try to take cars instead of figurgated trains
since the was such a hassle navigating all of the
social situations involved with that. Yes, and she would stay
with friends whenever she could. In Princeton, New Jersey, for example,
the naessaw In refused her room, so she ended up
staying with her pal Albert Einstein instead, which doesn't sound

(20:17):
so bad to me. And while she had refused to
sing in horizontally segregated venues, she accepted vertically segregated concerts.
So we were talking a little bit about that before.
Horizontally segregated means that there would be white people in
the orchestra section and then the black people would be
up in the kind of nosebleed speaks in the Balkindy. Yeah,
And vertical segregation was everybody sort of had the opportunity

(20:41):
to have a good seat, but they were secret. So
imagine a line down the middle. So if whether you're
black or white, you could still buy a cheap seat,
or you could buy a really good seat up close,
so she made that distinction. She at least insisted on
that she wanted people to be able to buy the
seats they wanted. So yeah, she wasn't. She wasn't looking
to be the figure of activism. And she even had

(21:02):
misgivings about performing the Lincoln Memorial Concert in the first place,
because by this point, because of the D A. R
controversy and Eleanor Roosevelt's involvement, it was really really high profile.
But part of her misgivings were just voice related. They
were just about the music. She had only performed once
before outside, so imagine your second concert outside. It's in

(21:25):
front of seventy five thousand people and broadcast nationally. But
she did it anyway, and and she certainly didn't dwell
on the triumph once it was over either. In her autobiography,
she initially wished that the National Mall concert, which is
probably the most identifiable part of her life, was not
in the book her I think her co writer insisted

(21:48):
that it was, but to her the success she had
had in Europe, where she was celebrated just as a
great singer and not a public figure, not some sort
of civil rights figure was more important to her, but
the concert also marked the real pinnacle of Anderson's career.
The Roosevelts remained champions and fans of hers, and Anderson
became the first African American performer at the White House,

(22:11):
and later in nineteen thirty nine she performed there in
front of the King and Queen of England. And then
in nineteen forty three she was invited by none other
than the d A R To perform a benefit concert.
So they came around face years and she she continued
really high profile events too. She performed at Eisenhower's second inauguration,
she performed at John F. Kennedy's inauguration, and in the

(22:34):
nineteen fifties, even with a kind of fading voice, by
this point she had traveled extensively, she had sunk so
many concerts, and she was getting older, she still made
her Metropolitan opera debut in Verdi's m Bala on Mascara
and um I am not familiar with that opera, but
supposedly even though it's a small part, it's a really

(22:56):
really good part. It's vital to the story, and it's
got eight music. And she had done Aria's obviously all
through her career, but she hadn't ever done an opera before,
so you know she was going to have to act
and wear a costume and really really sort of take
on new roles in performing. And the part also extended
into notes that were now uncomfortably high for her, so

(23:19):
she was reluctant to to get into this in the
first place, but finally she agreed, because, after all, who
could resist a debut at the Met in in there.
I think she's in her fifties or sixties by this point,
her fifties, I don't know. See was pretty nice. The
rest have been a good lure to She was paid
one thousand dollars per show, which at that point was

(23:40):
the highest fee paid to a MET singer to date.
Attendees to the show included Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Truman, and
the Duchess of Windsor, and she got a five minute
ovation at the end, so she probably didn't have as
much reason to worry as she thought when people just
wanted to see her After the show and she finally
got to go back to her dressing room, she had

(24:01):
two thousand telegrams come in. I mean, can you imagine
what that would be like then. That was actually, even
when some people were starting to call for her to
maybe consider retirement, she just had so many people who
still wanted to see her that she didn't really consider
it for a while. So she kept on touring, even
though she did slow her pace a little bit. She

(24:21):
eventually visited every continent except for Antarctica. She will just
give you a few highlights of these global tour. She
performed in front of the Imperial Court in Japan. She
was the first African American to do so. She toured
Israel because she really wanted to see places that had
inspired spirituals, like the River Jordans, the Walls of Jericho.

(24:43):
And an interesting detail about that, since German was not
um a very highly considered language in Israel at that time,
she performed a bronze piece which was originally written in
German translated into Hebrew, and I read a little metropo
all to an opera piece about that, and it noted
that the audience would not have cared if she had

(25:05):
performed it in German, but they were just thrilled that
she did take the extra stat to to learn it
in Hebrew and sing it that way. After that, she
traveled to Australia and also to New Zealand and her sixties,
and she didn't integrated tour of Texas later too, And
she also made recording, so while she wasn't traveling, she
was putting her voice on to tape. She did a

(25:26):
hundred and fifty tracks for R. C. A Victor, as
well as a documentary that was narrated by another great voice,
Edward R. Murrow, that was called The Lady from Philadelphia.
And during all of this work she settled down to
she married an old sweetheart. She had known him for
I think since her her twenties, Orpheus Fisher, and together
they bought a farm in Danbury, Connecticut, and they called

(25:49):
it Marianna. So she she was semi retired. I think
that she was still a pretty busy lady, though, yes
she was. In August nineteen sixty three, she returned to
the side of her previous triumph to sing He's got
the whole world in his hands, but her voice had
gone to this point so that she only got a
light applause for this. So that made her start to

(26:10):
think really seriously at this point about retirement, and she
began a farewell tour That final tour started with a
performance in October nineteen sixty four Constitution Hall, and it
included fifty cities overall, and the last performance was at
Carnegie Hall. She lived in Connecticut until the last year
of her life, when she finally moved to Oregon to

(26:30):
live with her nephew, who was a conductor. And she
died in nineteen at age ninety four. Yeah, and there's
some discrepancies about her age. She I read in two
different sources. One that she adjusted her age so that
she would be allowed to sing as a child in
a certain choir. She moved it up a couple of years.

(26:50):
Another thing I saw, though, she was so disappointed that
she had had to drop out of high school temporarily
and not graduate high school until she was twenty four,
that she's subtracted six years from her birthday, making her
younger than her two younger sisters. So yeah, it's it's
kind of I think she even had seventy five and

(27:11):
eightieth birthday celebrations that were definitely not her seventy and
eightieth birthdays. But there you go, just a little don't
totally trust any age you see associated with Mary Anderson.
Good to know well, I guess when you're that talented,
you can get away with a lot. So we have
a few more fun random facts for you about Marion Anderson.

(27:31):
She is on the five thousand dollar savings bond, which
is pretty cool. I mean that's almost like being on
a bill, like a dollar bill. That's a hefty savings bond.
It's pretty heppily the best people know about you. Yeah,
and she yeah, actually it's the highest one right now
because the ten thousand bond was apparently discontinued according to

(27:53):
the Treasury site. UM. She's also on a U S
postage stamp, and I thought this was really kind of
and yet but the d a R hosted the dedication
ceremony for the unveiling of her postage stamp. They are
really sorry about their treatment of Marian Anderson, judging by
their website. And if you want to learn more about her,

(28:14):
there's just so much out there, so many pictures, so
many recordings. It was really refreshing to to research something
like this, UM after I don't know some of the
more medieval topics than doing She's very well documented. UM.
There's a University of Pennsylvania collection with all sorts of
stuff on her and a really great tribute in The

(28:36):
New Yorker by Alex Ross. And that's actually how I
first heard about her. Um John Fuller, who hosts Stuff
from the B Side, suggested her after reading the Ross profile,
any recordings that you'd recommend, Um, I guess to start
with watching that whole Lincoln Memorial concert. That's that's what
I did. I think I didn't. I didn't listen to

(28:58):
it at all until I was about halfway through with research,
and by that point it was it was so extra poignant.
I think. I mean you and I were talking about
how when we were sort of going over this. Yeah,
I watched it right before we came in here, and
I got kind of tiary. Yeah, it's it's really moving,
and I think if you watch the video it's it's
even more so. So. If you have any other singer, dancer,

(29:22):
performer suggestions that kind of kind of went with this one,
because I so enjoyed doing that Belly Ruth episode a
few weeks ago, So send them our way. You can
email us that history podcast at how stuff works dot com.
We're also on Twitter at misst in history, and we're
on Facebook and if you want to find out a
little bit more about this group that did a total

(29:42):
one eighty on Marion Anderson. We have an article on
our website called how the d a R Works, and
you can look it up by visiting our homepage and
typing and d A R at www dot how stuff
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(30:03):
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