Marian Anderson: Philadelphia's Voice and the DAR's Locked Door

She grew up in South Philadelphia, the daughter of a woman who took in laundry. She learned to sing at Union Baptist Church, where the congregation passed a collection to pay for her voice lessons. Her teacher, Giuseppe Boghetti, told her within a few sessions that she had a talent unlike anything he had encountered in thirty years of teaching. Arturo Toscanini, the most famous conductor in the world, heard her perform in Europe in the nineteen thirties and said she had a voice heard once in a century.

Marian Anderson was the preeminent contralto of the twentieth century. She was also barred from performing at Constitution Hall in Washington in nineteen thirty-nine because of her race.

The Daughters of the American Revolution owned Constitution Hall and maintained a policy prohibiting Black artists from performing on its stage. When they rejected Anderson's booking for an April nineteen thirty-nine concert, Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her membership in the organization and made her resignation public. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes arranged an alternative. On Easter Sunday, April ninth, nineteen thirty-nine, Marian Anderson stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and sang to seventy-five thousand people gathered on the Mall. The concert was broadcast on national radio to millions more.

She opened with My Country, Tis of Thee. She closed with Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen.

The concert became one of the most significant cultural events of the pre-war era. Anderson had not sought to make a political statement. She had sought to give a concert. The statement was made for her by the institution that locked its door.

She went on to become the first Black singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera, in nineteen fifty-five. She sang the National Anthem at John Kennedy's inauguration in nineteen sixty-one. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in nineteen sixty-three.

Her Philadelphia origins, the church where she learned to sing, the neighborhood where she grew up, are the root of everything that followed.