The Voice That Challenged a Nation: Chapters 4-5

Although she now had a reputable concert manager, the Arthur Judson Agency, to book her appearances, she continued to travel with Billy King much as she always had, performing at black colleges and churches and for the local music organizations and concert series that had always accounted for most of her engagements.

“[My] high hopes began to dwindle,” Marian recalled.

She hadn’t been home very long before she decided that she ought to go back to Europe, this time to Germany, where she could immerse herself in the study of German lieder.

Offstage, Marian’s quiet beauty and unaffected charm had always attracted suitors, and that was the case in Berlin.

During her stay two young men vied for her attentions, each ignorant of the other’s interest.

While she enjoyed the flirtations and romantic intrigue (“I have had a most wonderful time,” she confided to a friend. “It was too much I tell you, too much!”), she wasn’t interested in a serious involvement.

With Kosti Vehanen as her accompanist, she appeared nearly everywhere in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark—in small communities near the Arctic Circle and in every major city—singing always to sold-out houses, wildly enthusiastic audiences, and ecstatic reviews.

During one ten-month period she gave 123 concerts in fifteen different countries, performing a repertoire that included over two hundred songs and arias in German, Italian, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish, and other languages.

But others who were present that evening did hear the maestro’s words as he took Marian’s hand.

Anderson returned to the United States at the end of 1935, ready to begin her first season under the management of Sol Hurok, the renowned international concert promoter, who had signed her to a contract after hearing her sing in Paris.

She had spent the better part of the past eight years in Europe, and during that time her career in the United States had languished.

Standing motionless, she captivated an audience that included other well-known singers.

[Her voice] is a contralto of stunning range and volume, managed with suppleness and grace.

She was exhilarated by the rave reviews, but always the self-critical artist, she wasn’t satisfied.

I studied the songs I had sung at Town Hall, examining my singing in retrospect to check where I had not done as I would have liked.

On the concert stage or over the airwaves, the transcendent quality of her voice touched her audiences deeply.

Even so, being welcomed by the White House and applauded by royalty weren’t enough to open the doors of the most prestigious auditorium in Washington, D.C.—Constitution Hall.

With its brilliant acoustics and nearly 4,000-seat capacity, it was the only hall in the nation’s capital that could compare with those in which Marian Anderson had appeared in cities throughout the United States and the world.

During the late 1920s and 1930s black and white patrons integrated the audiences of numerous lectures, meetings, and concerts in government auditoriums and in private concert halls.

To avoid mixed seating in the future, the DAR had voted in 1932 to impose a “white artists only” policy.

By 1936, when Anderson had returned from Europe and was beginning her first season under the management of the famous impresario Sol Hurok, the chapel on the Howard campus, where her recitals were held, was too small to satisfy the growing demand for tickets.

Since black artists were barred from appearing at Constitution Hall, Howard officials decided to schedule Anderson’s 1936 concert at Armstrong High School, a black school with a large auditorium.

“[Constitution Hall] stands almost in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, but the Great Emancipator’s sentiments about ‘race, creed or previous condition of servitude’ are not shared by the Daughters,” the paper said.

“Prejudice rules to make the Capital of the Nation ridiculous in the eyes of all cultured people.”

The newspaper called on Congress to build a federal auditorium in Washington that would be free of racial discrimination.

Among them were Walter White, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, a strong advocate of racial justice; and Eleanor Roosevelt, the first lady.

“This is such an astounding discrimination against equal rights that I am loath to believe that the Daughters of the American Revolution should invoke such a rule.”

At White’s suggestion, telegrams were sent out to prominent members of the musical community, asking them to protest the DAR’s ban on black performers.

But when the School Board met, it backed away from what had become an incendiary controversy.

Members of the group picketed the Board of Education and collected several thousand signatures on a petition denouncing the board’s action “as contrary to the spirit of democracy, and as a backward step in the development of interracial goodwill in the District of Columbia.”

One of the first people to respond was Eleanor Roosevelt, who wired: “I regret extremely that Washington is to be deprived of hearing Marian Anderson, a great artist.”

The next day, Mrs. Roosevelt announced her resignation in her nationally syndicated newspaper column, focusing worldwide attention on the controversy.

To remain as a member implies approval of that action, and therefore I am resigning.

It offered to grant Anderson the use of Central High for this one concert only, on condition that her appearance at a white school would not be considered a precedent and that no further applications from Anderson be submitted.

A free concert at the Lincoln Memorial would attract thousands of people, far more than any auditorium could hold, and would send a powerful message of defiance against the injustice of bigotry and racial discrimination.