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Marian Anderson sings at the Lincoln Memorial, with Cabinet members and senators seated at left. (Photo courtesy Harris & Ewing photograph Collection, Library of Congress)
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Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes congratulates Anderson after the concert. (Photo courtesy Harris & Ewing photograph Collection, Library of Congress)
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The crowd starts to form. (Photo courtesy Harris & Ewing photograph Collection, Library of Congress)
On the stage of the Mosque auditorium (now the Altria Theater), on July 2, 1939, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt presented concert vocalist Marian Anderson with the 24th Spingarn Medal, an annual award of achievement given by the NAACP. The civil rights organization held its 30th annual conference at that minaret-spiked venue from June 27 to July 2. When tickets for the ceremony sold out, filling the Mosque’s seating capacity of 5,000, journalist Walter F. White, an NAACP activist and executive secretary from Atlanta, persuaded NBC and other radio affiliates to broadcast the event. The NAACP’s Crisis magazine reported that about 4,000 people stood in Monroe Park listening through loudspeakers.
This recognition of Anderson’s contributions came as a benchmark for a remarkable career and the capstone of a momentous six months. By the early 1930s, the contralto — the first born of three daughters of a working class and devout Christian household whose grandparents had been enslaved in Virginia — had already sung with the New York Philharmonic and at Carnegie Hall. After a 1935 Salzburg (Austria) Festival concert, the famous conductor Arturo Toscanini said to Anderson of her three-octave range, “What I have heard today, one is privileged to hear only once in a hundred years.”
She didn’t perform at home as often as she wanted to — race being the primary barrier — and so she traveled to Europe, where she sang for sold-out houses. Anderson visited the White House in February 1936 at the invitation of the president and first lady. Eleanor Roosevelt, in her syndicated newspaper column, “My Day,” wrote afterward, “I have rarely heard a more beautiful and moving voice or a more finished artist.”
The acclaim increased Anderson’s audiences. When Howard University in Washington, D.C., invited her to participate in a concert series in 1939, the school turned to the Daughters of the American Revolution’s 4,000-seat Constitution Hall, hoping to get a one-time waiver from the white-artist-only clause. When the hall’s manager rejected the request, Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her DAR membership in protest. Addressing the organization in her “My Day” column on Feb. 27, 1939, she wrote, “You had an opportunity to lead in an enlightened way and it seems to me that your organization failed.”
Afterward, Anderson's manager, Sol Hurok, formed a committee with opera singer Kirsten Flagstad, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and the NAACP’s Walter White to select a suitable time and place for Anderson to sing. They opted for a free Easter Sunday concert on April 9, 1939, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Anderson stood in front of an integrated audience of 75,000 people, among them two U.S. Supreme Court justices, three members of the president’s Cabinet and four senators. She wore a bright, form-fitting, orange velour jacket, trimmed in gold with turquoise buttons, and a black velvet skirt. To fend off the chill of the cloudy evening, she wrapped herself in a mink coat.
NBC broadcast the program live, but there is no complete recording of the half-hour performance by Anderson and her Finnish accompanist, Kosti Vehanen. Short newsreel footage survives of Anderson’s first selection, “America,” in which she changed the words from “of thee I sing” to “of thee we sing.” In the cracking black-and-white video, her voice pours out, her eyes closed (she often sang this way), her tone as big as the seated stone Lincoln behind her, but full and passionate. In July, Anderson related to a Richmond News Leader reporter that as she prepared to sing, “I was so filled up and excited that I could hardly remember the words of songs I had sung many times.”
The NAACP’s decision to meet in Richmond that summer made a consequential gesture: The city then was more than half black, yet as throughout the South, segregationist restrictions applied to public places from schools to streetcars. Complementing this acknowledgment of Anderson’s renown, conference organizers arranged for an exhibition of black musicians and composers at the Richmond Public Library. (This would have been the 1930 stone and marble Art Deco central Dooley Library portion that the 1972 addition wraps around.) The sheet music, images and manuscripts from the collection of Arthur B. Spingarn, chairman of the NAACP’s national legal committee, included pieces by W.C. Handy, Richmond native Wendell Phillips Dabney, Duke Ellington, Scott Joplin and others.
The Spingarn program at the Mosque began at 2:30 p.m. with 30 minutes of singing by massed choirs under the direction of Joseph Matthews, conductor of Richmond’s Sabbath Glee Club. Gov. James H. Price spoke, offering fulsome praise to “the colored people of Richmond” and Eleanor Roosevelt. Walter White noted Richmond Times-Dispatch editor Virginius Dabney’s civil rights advocacy and support for a federal anti-lynching law.
Roosevelt’s brief talk stressed the importance of civil liberties and education in the defense of democracy, and she highlighted Anderson’s great achievement over adversity. Anderson said in response, “I feel it a signal honor to have received the medal from the hands of our first lady, who is not a first lady in name only, but in her every deed.”
Anderson then asked composer and baritone Harry T. Burleigh, a 1917 Spingarn medalist, to join her and the audience in singing the spiritual “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder.”
According to the recollections of the late Francis M. Foster Sr., archived at Virginia Commonwealth University, the MacDonald Trio, sisters who performed on Richmond's WRNL radio for “Colored Richmond on the Air,” at some point serenaded the singer.
Roosevelt and Anderson appeared on the Mosque balcony to wave to those gathered in the park.
The next day, News Leader writer Ann Cottrell caught up to an appreciative but fatigued Anderson on her way to a garden party held for her by the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority at the Craig House in Shockoe Bottom. “Some people can use beautiful words. Instead, my feelings are here,” Anderson told Cottrell, pressing a hand on her throat and her bosom.
Later, she did sing at Constitution Hall multiple times, starting with a war relief benefit in 1942. By then, the apologetic DAR had changed its rules.
In 1965, the year Anderson publicly retired, Beauford Delaney created an oil-on-canvas portrait of her which is today in the American Midcentury galleries of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Marian Anderson died at age 96 in 1993.
