Marion Anderson, American Contralto and the first African American to perform as a member of the New York Metropolitan Opera, was born on this day in 18971. With roots in Philadelphia, PA, she began singing in her church choir and quickly excelled, giving concerts while attending high school and taking private voice lessons from her teacher, Dr. Lucy Langdon Wilson and Italian voice master, Guiseppe Boghetti2. After debuting in Europe at the Paris Opera House in 1935, she gained international fame and returned to America later that year to debut at Carnegie Hall in New York City3. Despite international recognition and extreme talent, she still endured racial prejudice in the states- most notably- in April of 1939 when the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused to all her to perform in Constitution Hall4. This act of injustice resulted in Anderson’s making history by performing a concert at the Lincoln Memorial in front of a crown 75,000 people- where she was escorted on stage and introduced by Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior5. Anderson went on to sing at two presidential inaugurations, receive The Presidential Medal of Freedom bestowed by John F. Kennedy in 1963 and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 19916.
“In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free. Genius, like justice, is blind. Genius draws no color lines.” -Harold Ickes
To learn more about Marion Anderson, visit https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/four-years-after-marian-anderson-sang-lincoln-memorial-dr-finally-allowed-her-perform-constitution-hall-180950468/, https://fdrlibrary.org/anderson and http://www.fembio.org/english/biography.php/woman/biography/marian-anderson/
1. http://www.notablebiographies.com/A-An/Anderson-Marian.html
2. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/eleanor-anderson/
3. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Marian-Anderson
4. https://www.npr.org/2014/04/09/298760473/denied-a-stage-she-sang-for-a-nation
5. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/04/13/voice-of-the-century
6. https://timeline.com/first-black-singer-inauguration-a029e6675c11