March 24, 2018 • 30 mins
Today's show returns to Marian Anderson. An acclaimed contralto, Marian Anderson was barred from singing in Constitution Hall because of her race. The concert she sang at the Lincoln Memorial instead influenced a young Martin Luther King Jr.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Today we are sharing an episode from our predecessors,
Sarah and Deblina. Back in eleven, they talked about contralto
Marian Anderson, whose concert at the Lincoln Memorial made a
huge impression on the young Martin Luther King Jr. So enjoy.
(00:22):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chuck Reboarding. And today
we're gonna be talking about a famous singer. But we're
gonna start by talking about a famous speech, one of
(00:44):
the 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,
a ten year old Martin Luther King had been affected
by another Lincoln Memorial event, one that had been also
(01:05):
covered nationally broadcast coast to coast by NBC Radio, covered
in all the newspapers. Are 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 Zetti and Ave Maria and Spiritual is a
selection of spirituals to this utterly ecstatic crowd. They were
(01:29):
just thrilled to see her singing, an internationally renowned singer,
and see her sing 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 ninety. It was a huge event that
that concert was actually a result of earlier discrimination. The
(01:51):
Daughters of the American Revolution had refused to allow Anderson,
who was by that point an internationally acclaimed singer, to
perform at DC'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 backstory like that, in a voice like Anderson's,
(02:13):
the Easter nineteen 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 Marian Anderson, Martin Luther
King entered a speaking contest, and he noted the performance
and the inequalities that it had yet to address. In
(02:36):
the speech, he wrote, here's what he had to say.
She's saying 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 a touching tribute. But miss Anderson may not as
(02:59):
yet spend the nine in any good hotel in America.
So who was Marian 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 as a civil rights figure. Well, we're gonna get
(03:20):
to that, but first we're gonna start with her childhood.
She was born in Philadelphia in eight 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 at age six, and she actually gotten trouble
(03:41):
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 as them already. But she was also interested in
(04:02):
piano and violin. She bought a used violin herself by
saving up money from scrubbing steps, 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 discuss a little bit before we we
can really understand how Marian came to be what she was.
(04:26):
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
Dvorgiacque had announced that African Americans would be able to
attend the National Conservatory free of admission. And he made
(04:48):
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
a Erican music. So he thought that people with fewer
privileges should be able to to train up to be
a part of that future. And Anderson certainly seemed like
(05:10):
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 church concerts as shows by
quote the baby contralto. Yeah, and that was the first
(05:30):
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, 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
(05:53):
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 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
(06:14):
teach in Pennsylvania. So she did laundry and cleaning and sewing,
and it also caused 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 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
(06:38):
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 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
(07:00):
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 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
(07:21):
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 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
(07:45):
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 without even giving her a
chance to sing. But she still managed to continue her
(08:08):
train and even though she couldn't get into a school
like this, she went back to high school instead with
the support of our 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 also helped her continue
funding these private lessons, and by the time she started
(08:29):
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 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
(08:53):
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, 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
(09:16):
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 be
able to go 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
(09:37):
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,
and to practice the style for that type of singing.
She made her more formally. Yeah, He trained her formally,
(09:57):
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 twenty four, she also
started making recordings with Joseph Pastor Nach, who was the
conductor of the Philharmonic Society of Philadelphia. And interestingly, these
were the first recordings African American concert artist recordings of
(10:21):
spirituals for a major label. And um Marian has so
many first that we're 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 had a surprisingly big effect on her. Yes,
(10:42):
probably the worst one came in April nineteen 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 smack collaboration with the Philharmonic Society of Philadelphia.
(11:03):
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 grand prize. Indeed, the winner would appear as
(11:25):
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 burnt out, except they were cutting people off with
(11:46):
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 winning the competition and performed before
(12:07):
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.
There more of an opportunity to learn the languages of
(12:27):
classical music, including French, 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 n 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
(12:47):
addiction there and toward in Scandinavia, and the Scandinavians really
loved that her name was Anderson, just because yeah, the
newspapers there talked about quote maryon fever. So she was
really big there. But eventually she was touring the whole
continent and Asia as well. In four she made her
Paris debut, and in the Soviet Union she featured spirituals
(13:09):
and songs like ave Maria. She just changed the titles
to suit censors 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 change things around a little bit. I made
a few adjustments. The government there actually liked her so
much they arranged for recordings to inspire Soviet young people
(13:31):
in the Soviet Union, which is is really bizarre if
you think about it, that this, uh, this young woman
from Philadelphia would be a model for Soviet youths. But
there you go. So during all this touring, though, she
also obviously came into contact with a lot of great
European composers and performers and directors, and she met Finnish
(13:52):
composer Jean Spilius for instance, and Arturo Toscanini perhaps gave
her one of her most 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.
(14:14):
So it still holds true today, still holds true in
in some people's opinion. But by 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 sing in Berlin, where of course
she had performed extensively in the nineteen twenties, but organizers
(14:38):
called it off when they heard that she 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
(14:59):
grand success US, her state side manager, who was 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
(15:21):
or manager, and she was basically hiding from him. But
in Paris she had met impresario Soul Harrick and he
signed her away from Judson by guaranteeing at least fifteen
stateside concerts with a five hundred dollar fee per concerts.
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,
(15:44):
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
(16:05):
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,
(16:28):
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
(16:49):
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 herrock wanted her to debut
at Constitution Hall, which was really the only venue that
(17:11):
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 black performers, but they thought it
attracted too much of a black audience, so they made
(17:34):
a just blanket policy against black performers at Constitution Hall.
So Park 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,
(17:57):
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
(18:18):
with 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
(18:40):
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 thee. And here's what it
sounded like. That clip is pretty moving just listening to it,
(19:39):
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.
(20:02):
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 accompaniess fetch her food from
a restaurant that she wasn't able to go into. And
(20:25):
she'd even try to take cars instead of segregated trains
since it was such a hassle navigating all of the
social situations involved with that. And she would stay with
friends whenever she could. In Princeton, New Jersey, for example,
(20:47):
and nasaw In refused her room, so she ended up
staying with her pal Albert Einstein instead, which doesn't sound
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
(21:07):
the orchestra section and then the black people would be
up in the kind of Nosebleed speaks about. Yeah, and
vertical segregation was everybody sort of had the opportunity 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
(21:28):
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 this figure of activism. And she had even had
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.
(21:50):
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 in 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,
(22:13):
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
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
(22:34):
of civil rights figure, was more important to her. But
the concert also marked the real pinnacle of Anderson's career.
The Roosevelt's remained champions and fans of hers, and Anderson
became the first African American performer at the White House,
and later in nineteen thirty nine she performed there in
front of the King and Queen of England. And then
in nine she was invited by none other than the
(22:56):
d A. R. To perform a benefit concert. So they
came around it on faith. In a few 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 nineteen fifties, even with a kind of
fading voice, by this point she had traveled extensively, she
(23:16):
had sunk so many concerts, and she was getting older,
she still made her Metropolitan Opera debut in Verdi's and
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 really good part. It's vital to the story,
and it's got great music. And she had done Aria's
(23:39):
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 where 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 she was reluctant to to get into
this in the first place, but finally she agreed because,
(24:01):
after all, I mean, 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. Um, he
was pretty nice. Rst have been a good lure too.
She was paid one thousand dollars per show, which at
that point was the highest fee paid to h MET
singer to date. Attendees to the show included Eleanor Roosevelt,
(24:24):
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 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
(24:46):
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 eventually visited every continent except for Antarctica. She will
just give you a few highlights of these global tour.
(25:06):
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.
And an interesting detail about that, since German was not
um a very highly considered language in Israel at that time,
(25:28):
She performed a bronze piece which was originally written in
German translated into Hebrew, and I read a little Metropolitan
opera piece about that, and it noted that the audience
would not have cared if she had performed it in German,
but they were just thrilled that she did take the
extra step to to learn it in Hebrew and sing
it that way. After that, she traveled to Australia and
(25:51):
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 travel lng, she was putting her
voice on to tape. She did a 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
(26:13):
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 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
(26:36):
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 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,
(27:00):
in 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 live with her nephew,
who was a conductor. And she died in nine 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
(27:22):
sing as a child in a certain choir. She moved
it up a couple of years. 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.
(27:43):
So yeah, it's it's kind of I think she even
had seventy five and 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 c
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
(28:06):
you about Marion Anderson. 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 heavily the best
people know about you. Yeah, and yeah, actually it's the
highest one right now because the ten thousand bond was
(28:27):
apparently discontinued according to the Treasury site. Um. She's also
on a US postage stamp, and I thought this was
really kind of poignant, But the d a R hosted
the dedication ceremony for the unveiling of her postage stamp.
They are really sorry about their treatment of Marion Anderson,
judging by their website, And if you want to learn
(28:50):
more about her, there's just so much out there, so
many pictures, so many recordings. It was really refreshing to
to research something like this 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
(29:12):
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
(29:34):
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. Thank you so much for
(29:55):
joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out
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(30:16):
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Happy Saturday. Today we are sharing an episode from our predecessors,
Sarah and Deblina. Back in eleven, they talked about contralto
Marian Anderson, whose concert at the Lincoln Memorial made a
huge impression on the young Martin Luther King Jr. So enjoy.
(00:22):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chuck Reboarding. And today
we're gonna be talking about a famous singer. But we're
gonna start by talking about a famous speech, one of
(00:44):
the 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,
a ten year old Martin Luther King had been affected
by another Lincoln Memorial event, one that had been also
(01:05):
covered nationally broadcast coast to coast by NBC Radio, covered
in all the newspapers. Are 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 Zetti and Ave Maria and Spiritual is a
selection of spirituals to this utterly ecstatic crowd. They were
(01:29):
just thrilled to see her singing, an internationally renowned singer,
and see her sing 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 ninety. It was a huge event that
that concert was actually a result of earlier discrimination. The
(01:51):
Daughters of the American Revolution had refused to allow Anderson,
who was by that point an internationally acclaimed singer, to
perform at DC'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 backstory like that, in a voice like Anderson's,
(02:13):
the Easter nineteen 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 Marian Anderson, Martin Luther
King entered a speaking contest, and he noted the performance
and the inequalities that it had yet to address. In
(02:36):
the speech, he wrote, here's what he had to say.
She's saying 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 a touching tribute. But miss Anderson may not as
(02:59):
yet spend the nine in any good hotel in America.
So who was Marian 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 as a civil rights figure. Well, we're gonna get
(03:20):
to that, but first we're gonna start with her childhood.
She was born in Philadelphia in eight 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 at age six, and she actually gotten trouble
(03:41):
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 as them already. But she was also interested in
(04:02):
piano and violin. She bought a used violin herself by
saving up money from scrubbing steps, 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 discuss a little bit before we we
can really understand how Marian came to be what she was.
(04:26):
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
Dvorgiacque had announced that African Americans would be able to
attend the National Conservatory free of admission. And he made
(04:48):
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
a Erican music. So he thought that people with fewer
privileges should be able to to train up to be
a part of that future. And Anderson certainly seemed like
(05:10):
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 church concerts as shows by
quote the baby contralto. Yeah, and that was the first
(05:30):
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, 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
(05:53):
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 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
(06:14):
teach in Pennsylvania. So she did laundry and cleaning and sewing,
and it also caused 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 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
(06:38):
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 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
(07:00):
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 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
(07:21):
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 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
(07:45):
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 without even giving her a
chance to sing. But she still managed to continue her
(08:08):
train and even though she couldn't get into a school
like this, she went back to high school instead with
the support of our 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 also helped her continue
funding these private lessons, and by the time she started
(08:29):
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 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
(08:53):
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, 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
(09:16):
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 be
able to go 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
(09:37):
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,
and to practice the style for that type of singing.
She made her more formally. Yeah, He trained her formally,
(09:57):
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 twenty four, she also
started making recordings with Joseph Pastor Nach, who was the
conductor of the Philharmonic Society of Philadelphia. And interestingly, these
were the first recordings African American concert artist recordings of
(10:21):
spirituals for a major label. And um Marian has so
many first that we're 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 had a surprisingly big effect on her. Yes,
(10:42):
probably the worst one came in April nineteen 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 smack collaboration with the Philharmonic Society of Philadelphia.
(11:03):
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 grand prize. Indeed, the winner would appear as
(11:25):
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 burnt out, except they were cutting people off with
(11:46):
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 winning the competition and performed before
(12:07):
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.
There more of an opportunity to learn the languages of
(12:27):
classical music, including French, 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 n 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
(12:47):
addiction there and toward in Scandinavia, and the Scandinavians really
loved that her name was Anderson, just because yeah, the
newspapers there talked about quote maryon fever. So she was
really big there. But eventually she was touring the whole
continent and Asia as well. In four she made her
Paris debut, and in the Soviet Union she featured spirituals
(13:09):
and songs like ave Maria. She just changed the titles
to suit censors 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 change things around a little bit. I made
a few adjustments. The government there actually liked her so
much they arranged for recordings to inspire Soviet young people
(13:31):
in the Soviet Union, which is is really bizarre if
you think about it, that this, uh, this young woman
from Philadelphia would be a model for Soviet youths. But
there you go. So during all this touring, though, she
also obviously came into contact with a lot of great
European composers and performers and directors, and she met Finnish
(13:52):
composer Jean Spilius for instance, and Arturo Toscanini perhaps gave
her one of her most 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.
(14:14):
So it still holds true today, still holds true in
in some people's opinion. But by 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 sing in Berlin, where of course
she had performed extensively in the nineteen twenties, but organizers
(14:38):
called it off when they heard that she 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
(14:59):
grand success US, her state side manager, who was 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
(15:21):
or manager, and she was basically hiding from him. But
in Paris she had met impresario Soul Harrick and he
signed her away from Judson by guaranteeing at least fifteen
stateside concerts with a five hundred dollar fee per concerts.
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,
(15:44):
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
(16:05):
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,
(16:28):
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
(16:49):
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 herrock wanted her to debut
at Constitution Hall, which was really the only venue that
(17:11):
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 black performers, but they thought it
attracted too much of a black audience, so they made
(17:34):
a just blanket policy against black performers at Constitution Hall.
So Park 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,
(17:57):
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
(18:18):
with 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
(18:40):
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 thee. And here's what it
sounded like. That clip is pretty moving just listening to it,
(19:39):
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.
(20:02):
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 accompaniess fetch her food from
a restaurant that she wasn't able to go into. And
(20:25):
she'd even try to take cars instead of segregated trains
since it was such a hassle navigating all of the
social situations involved with that. And she would stay with
friends whenever she could. In Princeton, New Jersey, for example,
(20:47):
and nasaw In refused her room, so she ended up
staying with her pal Albert Einstein instead, which doesn't sound
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
(21:07):
the orchestra section and then the black people would be
up in the kind of Nosebleed speaks about. Yeah, and
vertical segregation was everybody sort of had the opportunity 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
(21:28):
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 this figure of activism. And she had even had
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.
(21:50):
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 in 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,
(22:13):
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
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
(22:34):
of civil rights figure, was more important to her. But
the concert also marked the real pinnacle of Anderson's career.
The Roosevelt's remained champions and fans of hers, and Anderson
became the first African American performer at the White House,
and later in nineteen thirty nine she performed there in
front of the King and Queen of England. And then
in nine she was invited by none other than the
(22:56):
d A. R. To perform a benefit concert. So they
came around it on faith. In a few 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 nineteen fifties, even with a kind of
fading voice, by this point she had traveled extensively, she
(23:16):
had sunk so many concerts, and she was getting older,
she still made her Metropolitan Opera debut in Verdi's and
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 really good part. It's vital to the story,
and it's got great music. And she had done Aria's
(23:39):
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 where 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 she was reluctant to to get into
this in the first place, but finally she agreed because,
(24:01):
after all, I mean, 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. Um, he
was pretty nice. Rst have been a good lure too.
She was paid one thousand dollars per show, which at
that point was the highest fee paid to h MET
singer to date. Attendees to the show included Eleanor Roosevelt,
(24:24):
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 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
(24:46):
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 eventually visited every continent except for Antarctica. She will
just give you a few highlights of these global tour.
(25:06):
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.
And an interesting detail about that, since German was not
um a very highly considered language in Israel at that time,
(25:28):
She performed a bronze piece which was originally written in
German translated into Hebrew, and I read a little Metropolitan
opera piece about that, and it noted that the audience
would not have cared if she had performed it in German,
but they were just thrilled that she did take the
extra step to to learn it in Hebrew and sing
it that way. After that, she traveled to Australia and
(25:51):
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 travel lng, she was putting her
voice on to tape. She did a 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
(26:13):
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 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
(26:36):
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 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,
(27:00):
in 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 live with her nephew,
who was a conductor. And she died in nine 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
(27:22):
sing as a child in a certain choir. She moved
it up a couple of years. 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.
(27:43):
So yeah, it's it's kind of I think she even
had seventy five and 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 c
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
(28:06):
you about Marion Anderson. 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 heavily the best
people know about you. Yeah, and yeah, actually it's the
highest one right now because the ten thousand bond was
(28:27):
apparently discontinued according to the Treasury site. Um. She's also
on a US postage stamp, and I thought this was
really kind of poignant, But the d a R hosted
the dedication ceremony for the unveiling of her postage stamp.
They are really sorry about their treatment of Marion Anderson,
judging by their website, And if you want to learn
(28:50):
more about her, there's just so much out there, so
many pictures, so many recordings. It was really refreshing to
to research something like this 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
(29:12):
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
(29:34):
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. Thank you so much for
(29:55):
joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out
of the archive, if you at an email address or
a Facebook, U r L or something similar during the
course of the show, that may be obsolete. Now. So
here's our current contact information. We are at history podcasts
at how stuff works dot com, and then we're at
missed in the history. All over social media that is
(30:16):
our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks
again for listening. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, is it how stuff works dot com
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