Marian Anderson

• 1. Introduction

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  Marian Anderson stepped onto the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, the 9th of April 1939, and opened with "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." More than 75,000 people stood before her. Millions more listened on the radio. She had been banned from singing inside Constitution Hall just weeks before, turned away by a whites-only performer policy. What brought her to that outdoor stage, and what she made of the moment, tells us something essential about the country she sang to.

  Anderson was a contralto from Philadelphia, born on the 27th of February 1897, who became one of the most celebrated classical voices of the twentieth century. She performed with major orchestras on both sides of the Atlantic, sang for two presidential inaugurations, and broke the color barrier at the Metropolitan Opera. But her path from a South Philadelphia church choir to the Lincoln Memorial steps was shaped as much by what America refused her as by what it finally offered. What kept pushing her forward, and what price did she pay for the doors that closed before the ones that opened?

• 2. A Philadelphia Upbringing

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  John Berkley Anderson sold ice and coal at the Reading Terminal in downtown Philadelphia, and later liquor. His wife, Annie Delilah Rucker, had briefly studied at the Virginia Seminary and College in Lynchburg before working as a schoolteacher. When Annie moved to Philadelphia, a law applied only to Black teachers prevented her from teaching in the city's schools. She cared for children instead. Into that household, Marian was born in 1897, the eldest of three sisters.

  The Union Baptist Church was the center of the family's world. Marian's aunt Mary, her father's sister, took special notice of the girl's voice and brought her into the junior choir at the age of six. From those early Sundays, Aunt Mary arranged for Marian to sing at local functions, often earning 25 or 50 cents a performance. By her early teens, she was making as much as four or five dollars at a time, a substantial sum for the era. Anderson later credited her aunt's steady encouragement as the reason she pursued singing at all.

  When Marian was twelve, her father was struck by a head injury at the Reading Terminal before Christmas 1909. He died shortly after, at 37. The family moved in with his parents, Benjamin and Isabella Anderson. Benjamin Anderson had been born enslaved and was emancipated in the 1860s, becoming the first in his family to settle in South Philadelphia. He and Marian grew close in the brief year before his death.

  Left without funds for music lessons or high school tuition, Marian kept performing wherever she could. The congregation of her church, along with Reverend Wesley Parks and leaders of the Black community in Philadelphia, collected the money she needed to study with Mary Saunders Patterson and to attend South Philadelphia High School. She graduated in 1921. The community's belief in her voice would eventually reach as far as a Rosenwald Fellowship and a concert in Berlin.

• 3. European Discovery

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  Giuseppe Boghetti was reduced to tears during Anderson's audition, when she sang "Deep River." He took her on as a student and scheduled a recital at The Town Hall in New York City in April 1924. The hall was nearly empty, and the reviews were poor. It was the kind of setback that might have ended a career, yet Anderson kept working. In 1923, she had already made her first recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Company in Camden, New Jersey.

  The breakthrough came in 1925, when she won a singing competition sponsored by the New York Philharmonic. On the 26th of August 1925, she performed in concert with that orchestra and won immediate praise from audiences and critics alike. Arthur Judson, the Philharmonic's director, became her manager. But for all her skill, racial prejudice in the United States blunted her momentum. She gave her first Carnegie Hall performance in 1928, yet doors kept closing.

  A Rosenwald Fellowship worth $1,500 sent her to Berlin to study. There she trained under Sara Charles-Cahier and Geni Sadero before launching a European tour. In the summer of 1930, she traveled to Scandinavia and met the Finnish pianist Kosti Vehanen. He became her regular accompanist and vocal coach for many years. Through Vehanen, she was introduced to Jean Sibelius after he heard her perform in Helsinki. Moved, Sibelius invited Anderson and Vehanen to his home and asked that champagne be served in place of the customary coffee. He told her she had penetrated the Nordic soul. For many years afterward, Sibelius arranged and composed songs specifically for her, including a new arrangement of "Solitude," which he dedicated to her in 1939.

  By 1933, Anderson was making her European debut at Wigmore Hall in London to an enthusiastic reception. Touring through Russia and the major cities of Eastern Europe, she attracted a following the source describes as "Marian fever" in Scandinavia. The conductor Arturo Toscanini heard her during a 1935 tour in Salzburg and told her she possessed a voice heard once in a hundred years.

• 4. The Constitution Hall Affair

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  Sarah Corbin Robert, president general of the Daughters of the American Revolution, denied Anderson permission to perform at Constitution Hall on the 9th of April 1939. The hall's white performers-only policy was the official reason, but the broader context was a segregated Washington, D.C., where Black patrons would have been confined to the back of the hall and where the building lacked the segregated public bathrooms then required by D.C. law. The District of Columbia Board of Education separately refused Anderson the use of the Central High School auditorium.

  Charles Edward Russell, a co-founder of the NAACP, convened a meeting the next day to form the Marian Anderson Citizens Committee. The group included the National Negro Congress, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the American Federation of Labor, and the Washington Industrial Council-CIO. Charles Hamilton Houston was elected chairman. On the 20th of February, the committee picketed the Board of Education, gathered petition signatures, and planned a mass protest.

  Thousands of DAR members resigned in protest, among them First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote to the organization: "I am in complete disagreement with the attitude taken in refusing Constitution Hall to a great artist... You had an opportunity to lead in an enlightened way and it seems to me that your organization has failed." The novelist Zora Neale Hurston offered a sharper critique. She argued that Roosevelt's condemnation of the DAR was incomplete because it ignored the Board of Education's simultaneous refusal, which Hurston linked to the Democratic Congress that controlled the District.

  The American press broadly supported Anderson's right to sing. The Philadelphia Tribune mocked the DAR; the Richmond Times-Dispatch tied the ban to the racial policies of the Third Reich. With Eleanor Roosevelt, President Roosevelt, NAACP executive secretary Walter White, and manager Sol Hurok pressing Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, the open-air Lincoln Memorial concert was arranged. Two months after the concert, Roosevelt presented Anderson with the 1939 Spingarn Medal at the 30th NAACP conference in Richmond, Virginia, delivered on national radio over NBC and CBS.

• 5. The Metropolitan and Beyond

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  On the 7th of January 1955, at the invitation of director Rudolf Bing, Marian Anderson walked onto the Metropolitan Opera stage in New York and sang the part of Ulrica in Giuseppe Verdi's Un ballo in maschera. The role placed her opposite Zinka Milanov and, on other nights, Herva Nelli, as Amelia. Anderson described the moment the curtain rose on the second scene: she was there mixing the witch's brew when the audience began to applaud before she had sung a single note. She recalled feeling herself tighten into a knot. She became the first African American to perform with the company, and though she never appeared there again, she was named a permanent member of the Metropolitan Opera.

  The following year, her autobiography, My Lord, What a Morning, was published and became a bestseller. In 1943, years before that debut, she had returned to Constitution Hall at the DAR's own invitation to sing before an integrated audience as a benefit for the American Red Cross. Anderson said she felt no different there than in any other concert hall and had no sense of triumph. Meanwhile, the District of Columbia Board of Education continued to bar her from high school auditoriums in the city.

  On the 15th of June 1953, Anderson headlined The Ford 50th Anniversary Show, broadcast live from New York City on both NBC and CBS simultaneously. She sang "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands" midway through, then returned to close with the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." The program drew an audience of 60 million viewers. Four decades later, television critic Tom Shales called it both a landmark in television and a milestone in the cultural life of the 1950s.

  Her farewell tour began at Constitution Hall on the 24th of October 1964 and concluded at Carnegie Hall on the 18th of April 1965. Anderson had given approximately seventy recitals a year during her peak American seasons, traveling internationally as a goodwill ambassador for the U.S. State Department and covering 35,000 miles across India and the Far East in twelve weeks, giving 24 concerts along the way. President Eisenhower subsequently appointed her a delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Committee.

• 6. A Life in Danbury

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  Orpheus H. "King" Fisher had first asked Marian Anderson to marry him when both were teenagers. She declined, fearing marriage would derail her career. On the 17th of July 1943, she became his second wife in a private ceremony in Bethel, Connecticut, conducted by United Methodist pastor Reverend Jack Grenfell. A bake sale on the lawn of the Bethel United Methodist Church forced a last-minute change of venue; the ceremony was moved to the Elmwood Chapel at the site of the Elmwood Cemetery.

  In 1940, Anderson and Fisher had purchased a three-story Victorian farmhouse on a 100-acre farm in Danbury, Connecticut, after searching throughout New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Fisher, an architect, built multiple structures on the property over the years, including an acoustic rehearsal studio designed specifically for his wife. Anderson called the farm Marianna Farm and considered it her retreat from public life. She stayed there for nearly fifty years.

  In Danbury, Anderson lived as a regular resident. She visited the Danbury State Fair, sang at city hall during Christmas ornament lighting, served on the board of the Danbury Music Center, and supported the Charles Ives Center for the Arts and the local NAACP chapter. She gave a concert at Danbury High School and declined special treatment at local shops and restaurants.

  Orpheus Fisher died in 1986 after 43 years of marriage. Anderson remained at Marianna Farm until 1992, then moved to Portland, Oregon, to live with her nephew, conductor James DePreist. She died there on the 8th of April 1993 of congestive heart failure, at the age of 96. She is buried at Eden Cemetery in Collingdale, Pennsylvania. In 2004, the Danbury Museum and Historical Society restored and opened her studio to the public after receiving a state grant, preserving photographs and memorabilia from her career.

• 7. Legacy and the Award

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  Leontyne Price and Jessye Norman both named Anderson as an inspiration. She was awarded the first Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, the Congressional Gold Medal in 1977, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1978, the National Medal of Arts in 1986, and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991. The United States Treasury Department embossed a half-ounce gold commemorative medal with her portrait in 1980. In 1984, she was the first person honored with the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award of the City of New York.

  After receiving The Philadelphia Award in 1940, which came with $25,000 in prize money, Anderson used the funds to establish a singing competition to support young singers. That prize fund was eventually exhausted and disbanded in 1976, but the Marian Anderson Award was re-established in 1990 and ran annually until 2019, when the last award was given to Kool and the Gang. In 1998, the award's structure shifted to recognize established artists in any field who demonstrated humanitarian leadership.

  In 2022, the award moved from private management to Play On Philly, a classical music education organization, and the annual ceremony was replaced by the Marian Anderson Young Artist Program, a tuition-free program explicitly designed to serve young people from communities historically excluded from the highest levels of musical opportunity.

  On the 8th of June 2024, Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia was renamed Marian Anderson Hall. The renaming returned her name to the city where a congregation once passed a collection plate so a girl without tuition money could take her first formal singing lessons.