The Voice That Challenged a Nation: Chapters 6-8

As Anderson continued with her scheduled tour, the furor over Constitution Hall “seemed to increase and follow me wherever I went.”

Reporters and photographers were waiting for her at every stop with a barrage of questions: “Do you feel insulted by this refusal?” “What is your attitude toward all this?” “What do you intend to do?”

But she was reluctant to speak out.

“I was sorry for the people who had precipitated the affair,” she later said.

She has endowed Marian Anderson with such voice as lifts any individual above his fellows, as is a matter of exultant pride to any race. . .

Her breath seemed to leave her for that fleeting moment, but I think that those who were privileged to see her at that time were much more moved than she was.

I had a feeling that a great wave of good will poured out from these people, almost engulfing me.

In her rendition “Of thee I sing” was replaced by “To thee we sing.”

After a brief intermission she sang three spirituals: “Gospel Train,” “Trampin’,” and “My Soul Is Anchored in the Lord,” and finally, as an encore, she ended with another spiritual, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See,” a gentle lamentation that brought tears to the eyes of many in that hushed audience.

Then the spell was broken as great numbers of people, stirred by their own emotions, roared their acclaim and rushed toward Anderson to offer congratulations and good wishes, threatening to mob her.

It was a slender black girl dressed in somewhat too garishly hued Easter finery.

Hers was not the face of one who had been the beneficiary of much education or opportunity.

They were hands that despite their youth had known only the dreary work of manual labor.

Her hat was askew, but in her eyes flamed hope bordering on ecstasy.

Life which had been none too easy for her now held out greater hope because one who was also colored and who, like herself, had known poverty, privation, and prejudice, had, by her genius, gone a long way toward conquering bigotry.

The concert is recognized today as a milestone in the struggle for equal rights.

The NAACP, the civil rights organization most closely identified with the concert, reaped substantial rewards.

Her participation in the event was the artistic high point of the evening and an unspoken rebuke to the snobbery and prejudice that had excluded her from Constitution Hall.

“It must be tremendously gratifying to feel that you have won out over very great difficulties,” Mrs. Roosevelt said.

As a gesture of compromise and goodwill, the Daughters invited Marian Anderson to give the opening concert, a benefit for the United China Relief Fund.

“I look at the itinerary, see that I am scheduled to stay at a certain hotel in a certain city, and sense that an exception has been made,” she wrote in her autobiography in 1956.

“I believe that the time has come,” said black educator Mary McLeod Bethune, “when people like Marian Anderson and others who believe in the complete annihilation of segregation and discrimination should make the public announcement that they will not appear before any segregated audience.”

From then on, Anderson and other black performers began to appear regularly in the hall, and segregation was no longer an issue.

Thirty years after her New York debut (and eight years after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in professional baseball), she became the first African American to be a soloist at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, an honor accorded her (and the opera company) when she was well past the age at which singers normally make operatic debuts.

When the curtain rose to reveal Anderson sitting before a steaming cauldron, mixing the witch’s brew in the darkness of Ulrica’s cave, the audience burst into a standing ovation that lasted nearly five minutes before the scene could begin.

Occasionally, she crossed paths with Eleanor Roosevelt, another perpetual traveler, and they would enjoy a brief visit before going their separate ways.

During her career, Anderson sang twice more on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial: in 1952 at memorial services for her old comrade in arms Harold Ickes, and again in 1963 at the historic Civil Rights March on Washington, at which Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his eloquent “I Have a Dream” speech before 200,000 peaceful demonstrators.

Over the years she was showered with awards, tributes, and honorary degrees.

“When Miss Anderson sang the simple spiritual ‘Hear de Lambs a-Cryin’ in her deep, hollow, subterranean register . . . you felt it up and down the spinal column,” wrote New York Herald-Tribune critic Alan Rich.

I called her to tell her how outraged, hurt, sorry, and grateful I was.

She also made a point of helping young singers, particularly through the Marian Anderson Scholarship Fund, which she had started back in 1941 when the city of Philadelphia presented her with the $10,000 Bok Award, given annually to a Philadelphian who had performed “some service that redounds to the credit of the city.”

In films and on the vaudeville stage blacks were portrayed as comic dolts, stupid and lazy, unable to speak proper English, much less sing fluently in foreign languages.

But it was the strength of her character, her undaunted spirit and unshakable dignity, that transformed her from a singer to an international symbol of progress in the advancement of human rights.

But it is not right for me to try to mimic somebody who writes or who speaks. That is their forte.

What I had was singing, and if my career has been of some consequence, then that’s my contribution.