On Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939, a 42-year-old contralto stepped up to a microphone on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. In front of her stood an estimated 75,000 people, Black and white together. Millions more listened by radio. Her name was Marian Anderson, and she was only there because another door had been shut in her face.
Her story is not about anger. It is about a gift God gave a little girl in a church choir, and about a woman who kept singing until the world made room.
A Voice Raised in Church
Marian Anderson was born in Philadelphia on February 27, 1897, the first of three children. Her mother was a Methodist and her father a Baptist. “We were between two churches,” she told American Heritage magazine years later.
At about six years old she joined the choir at Union Baptist Church. The National Portrait Gallery notes that people there called her the “Baby Contralto.” The congregation became her first audience, and in many ways her first sponsor.
Then the first storm came. Her father died after an accident at work when she was about twelve. The family had little money. But, as the Library of Congress tells it, church members helped pay for her schooling and voice lessons.
When a well-known teacher, Giuseppe Boghetti, offered to train her, she could not afford it. So Union Baptist held a gala concert. According to the National Portrait Gallery, it raised about $600 for her lessons. In her autobiography, My Lord, What a Morning, she wrote that she “might have known that . . . the people at the Union Baptist Church would find a way to provide.”
“We Don’t Take Colored”
Earlier in life, Marian had gone to a music school in Philadelphia to ask about applying. The clerk at the window turned her away because she was Black. In the 1977 American Heritage interview, she called it “a tremendously great shock.”
She did not quit. She studied privately, sang wherever she could, and in the mid-1920s won a major contest that let her sing with the New York Philharmonic in Lewisohn Stadium. Later she traveled to Europe, studied in Berlin and London, and toured Scandinavia. The famous conductor Arturo Toscanini, American Heritage reports, said she had “a voice one hears once in a hundred years.”
The Closed Hall and the Open Sky
In 1939, Anderson was invited to sing in Washington. But the Daughters of the American Revolution, who owned Constitution Hall, refused her because she was Black, according to the National Archives. A local school auditorium said no as well.
Many Americans were troubled by the refusal. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, with encouragement from Mrs. Roosevelt and Walter White of the NAACP, arranged a free outdoor concert at the Lincoln Memorial, sponsored by Howard University.
So on Easter Sunday, the closed hall became an open sky.
She opened with “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.” In her autobiography she admitted, “I felt for a moment as though I were choking.” Then she sang Schubert’s “Ave Maria” and, after intermission, spirituals she had loved since childhood, including “My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord.” For an encore she sang “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” the Library of Congress records.
Looking back, she did not paint herself as a crusader. “I was not trying to cut anybody down,” she told American Heritage.
Doors That Opened Later
The storm did not stop her. On January 7, 1955, she became the first African American to sing a role at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, as Ulrica in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera. In 1958 she served as an alternate U.S. delegate to the United Nations. In 1963 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
She died on April 8, 1993, in Portland, Oregon. PBS notes that it was one day before the anniversary of her Lincoln Memorial concert.
What Her Life Teaches Us
- Grace answers better than bitterness. She was wronged, yet she chose to sing, not to tear anyone down.
- A church family can change a life. One gala concert and a congregation that believed in her helped launch a voice heard around the world.
- When one door closes, God can open a bigger one. A shut concert hall led to a stage under the open sky.
The spiritual she sang that Easter says it well: her soul was anchored. The Bible uses the same picture for the hope we have in God.
“Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast…”
Hebrews 6:19 (KJV)
Whatever door has closed in front of you, keep your soul anchored and keep using the gift God gave you. The world may need to hear it.
Through every storm, we rise together.
Who in your church or family believed in you before anyone else did?
Sources: National Archives, “Marian Anderson”; National Portrait Gallery, “From Church Choir to Civil Rights: Marian Anderson’s Path of Hope”; Library of Congress, “Marian Anderson’s Spirituals” (Apr 9, 2018); American Heritage, “A Voice One Hears Once in a Hundred Years” (Feb 1977); Penn Libraries, “About Marian Anderson”; PBS American Masters, “Marian Anderson Biography and Timeline”; Britannica, “Marian Anderson”; KJV Hebrews 6:19
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