American Experience (1988) s33e06 Episode Script

1
♪♪
♪♪
(crowd chattering,
flash bulbs popping)
MAN:
Testing one, two.
Testing one, two.
(microphone feedback squeals)
(crowd chattering,
flash bulbs popping)
♪♪
NARRATOR:
In the spring of 1939,
Marian Anderson
was one of the most famous
entertainers in the world,
known to millions as
the Voice of the Century.
But as she rehearsed in the
shadow of the Lincoln Memorial,
it was all she could do
to keep her nerves in check.
In a few hours, Anderson was
to sing a free concert
for tens of thousands
of spectators here,
and for millions more listening
on the radio coast to coast.
None of this
had been her choice.
LESLIE UREÑA:
She called her manager
the night before and said,
"Do I still have to go through
with this?"
LUCY CAPLAN:
It was so weighted with
political
and social symbolism
in ways that were beyond
her control.
ALLIDA BLACK:
She knew the minute
that she stood before Lincoln
that this would be
how she would be defined
for the rest of her life.
NARRATOR:
Racism shadowed every aspect
of Anderson's life.
A few months earlier,
she had been barred
from the only suitable
concert hall in Washington
by an organization called
the Daughters of
the American Revolution.
Anderson had been
shut out because of her race
many times before,
from many places.
But this time
civil rights groups, churches,
even First Lady
Eleanor Roosevelt
had rallied to defend
her rights.
It had all led to this moment,
to an unprecedented
demonstration
for freedom and equality,
in the heart of
the nation's capital.
ADRIANE LENTZ-SMITH:
Anderson has an appeal
that crosses age
and color lines.
This woman,
whether she wants to be or not,
is perfect for
highlighting the absurdity
of American racial codes.
LUCY CAPLAN:
She had worked so hard
to be known as an artist.
And she knew that
this would turn her into
a political figure.
And that was distinctly not
what she wanted for herself.
But she also recognized
the power of what she could do.
♪♪
She was becoming
part of this thing
that was so much
bigger than herself.
LENTZ-SMITH:
The civil rights movement did
not begin in 1954 or 1955.
The struggle was
already in motion.
Folks had been fighting,
pushing, refining for decades.
KIRA THURMAN:
When we think of the civil
rights movement, we go first
to a lot of African American
men.
Marian Anderson is an outlier.
ANGELA BROWN:
She became a political icon,
and the face of a movement.
And that was something she could
never step back from.
♪♪
(bell tolling)
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Marian Anderson had known what
she wanted from life
since she was a girl.
"I was so interested in music,"
she said,
"that other things didn't matter
a lot."
So when the 17-year-old walked
into the lobby
of the Philadelphia Musical
Academy in 1914
and waited for her turn to fill
out an application,
she was on the verge of
realizing her fondest ambition.
If she was accepted
by the academy,
then Anderson could begin her
formal musical education:
singing lessons, languages,
acting, music theory.
It would be a dream come true.
♪♪
Anderson had been known among
Philadelphia's Black community
ever since she joined the
Union Baptist choir
after her sixth birthday
The baby contralto,
she'd been called.
CHOIR:
My Lord ♪
What a morning ♪
My Lord ♪
What a morning ♪
BROWN:
She sang a lot of spirituals,
hymns,
the great anthems of the church.
Union Baptist was one of those
places where a Negro,
a Black person, could go
and hear high church,
high holy music.
And so those were the things
that she cut her teeth on
early on.
CHOIR:
Begin to ♪
Fall ♪
NARRATOR:
But Marian Anderson was
an unlikely candidate
for the Musical Academy.
She'd had to leave school
when she was twelve years old,
after her father was killed
in an accident at work.
The family was plunged
into poverty.
ALISHA JONES:
Her whole world turned upside
down when her father passed.
Her mother had to take on
multiple jobs
in order to provide for her
three daughters.
The sacrifice and love
investment
that her mother was making
stuck with Marian Anderson for
the rest of her life.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
While her mother was working
at a tobacco factory,
Marian raised her two younger
sisters
and did odd jobs to help
with the finances.
Union Baptist became her refuge.
It was at an evening
concert there
that Anderson first caught
the eye and ear
of America's greatest
Black tenor, Roland Hayes.
LUCY CAPLAN:
Roland Hayes
is what Anderson aspires to be,
and he recognized that Anderson
was no kind of just
top-student-in-the-church-choir
kind of voice.
♪♪
He became a real mentor.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Hayes offered support
and guidance,
but he couldn't change
the financial realities
of Anderson's life.
Friends and supporters could see
her future being slowly
smothered.
So when Anderson was a teenager,
the congregation at
Union Baptist took up the first
of many collections
for the young woman they called
"our Marian."
BROWN:
There's always a ram
in the bush.
She did have benefactors
that weren't wealthy,
but had great wealth of heart.
NARRATOR:
By the time Anderson was 17,
Philadelphia's Black community
had raised enough money
that she could finally begin
high school, and best of all,
study music at the
Philadelphia Musical Academy.
But when the time to apply
finally arrived,
Anderson waited all day
in the lobby
as white girls
were ushered past.
BROWN:
When everyone was gone,
the white girl says,
"Well, what do you want?"
And she says, "Well, I want
to apply for the school."
You know,
"I've come to get information."
And she was like,
"We don't take colored."
♪♪
LENTZ-SMITH:
Most Black people
in the public eye
have a story about their initial
encounter with Jim Crow racism.
And it usually coincides with
some kind of
coming of age because it is,
in fact, in some ways,
a coming-of-age story.
♪♪
MARIAN ANDERSON (dramatized):
I don't know how I got out of
the place and back home.
Maybe it would have been better
if my mother had told me
when I was littler
what kind of things could happen
to you if you were a Negro.
All of my dreams were
just shattered around my head.
(children playing)
NARRATOR:
Ever since her father died,
Anderson had watched her mother
confront hardship
with dignity and unwavering
determination.
"Mother had a strength beyond
herself," she said,
and Marian had taken on some
of the same qualities.
Just weeks after the crushing
blow at the Musical Academy,
Anderson began singing lessons
with a neighborhood teacher,
and then started high school.
In her spare hours,
she taught herself piano
and sang for just about every
Ladies Auxiliary, YWCA,
church group,
and social club in Philadelphia.
JONES:
She had to regroup.
In many ways, she found her
ingenuity during this time.
She still found a way to steal
away, as the elders say.
NARRATOR:
But despite her talent
and ambition,
Anderson made little headway
outside her
Philadelphia community.
So when the 24-year-old
was invited
to perform in Chicago in 1919,
at the first meeting
of the National Association
of Negro Musicians,
she jumped at the opportunity.
But that summer was a risky time
for a Black woman to be
traveling across the country.
♪♪
In July alone,
there were deadly riots
in Washington,
New York, Norfolk, Virginia,
and a dozen other cities.
LENTZ-SMITH:
The summer of 1919
is the crest
of one of the most vicious years
in American history.
There are riots that just kind
of sweep the nation.
They're not just Southern riots.
Not only have segregation
and the underlying ethos of
Jim Crow gone national,
but the commitment to
reinforcing and defending them
through, through terroristic
violence
is also national.
NARRATION:
Jim Crow was following
the Great Migration northward,
and both had landed in Chicago.
(horns honking)
In the last two years alone,
an estimated 50,000 Black people
had arrived in the city,
almost doubling Chicago's
African American population.
New arrivals crowded up uneasily
against a huge influx
of immigrants
fleeing Southern
and Eastern Europe.
♪♪
Those European migrants were
divided
by religion, language,
and ethnicity.
But they held one thing in
common;
an antipathy toward
Black people.
Business owners exploited
racial tensions,
frequently using Black workers
to undercut wages
and break strikes.
LENTZ-SMITH:
Marian Anderson travels
to a Chicago in 1919
that's basically a powder keg.
And it has many of the
conditions that you'll see
in cities across the country.
There's pressure on housing.
There's competition
over jobs.
There are returning soldiers,
Black and white;
Black soldiers angry about
their World War I experience
and convinced that they've
earned
their full citizenship rights
and white soldiers determined
to keep African Americans
from acting on their
convictions.
♪♪
(seagulls squawking)
NARRATION:
On the afternoon of July 27,
14-year-old
Eugene Williams was killed
when his raft drifted into the
white section
of the 29th Street Beach.
A policeman refused to arrest
his assailant.
Fights broke out between Black
and white bystanders.
While Anderson was at the
Chicago Musical College
preparing for the most important
performance of her life,
the rising tide of
racial violence
came crashing down around her.
LENTZ-SMITH:
There were rampaging mobs
moving through Black
neighborhoods,
rumors circulating about
violence being done
all over the city,
bodies riddled with bullets
or set afire
no one quite sure about
all of the things going on,
but knowing it was bad.
NARRATOR:
Over five days,
23 African Americans
and 15 whites were killed
in Chicago,
and 500 people injured.
But the National Association
of Negro Musicians
would not be deterred;
the performance had to be
postponed and relocated
to a cramped hall at the YMCA,
but on the first of August 1919,
Marian Anderson made her
concert debut
in an extraordinary moment.
(Marian Anderson singing
"Bach Erbarme Dich" in German)
♪♪
(Marian Anderson
singing in German)
(singing continues)
LENTZ-SMITH:
One of the things that art
has long done,
especially for
African-American communities,
is to find a language of
transcendence
in hopelessness.
(singing continues)
Because the moment you let go
of that, what do you have?
You're lost.
♪♪
(song ends)
(crowd chattering)
NARRATOR:
The memory of Red Summer
was still fresh
on Memorial Day in 1922,
when official Washington
gathered on the Mall
to dedicate the new
Lincoln Memorial.
The organizers had invited a few
African-American lawyers,
professors,
and other dignitaries,
but many of them walked out
when they realized
they were being herded
to a segregated area,
back among the dirt and weeds.
♪♪
LENTZ-SMITH:
The fact that the dedication
of the Lincoln Memorial
was segregated is surprising
to us
until we actually think about
the moment in history
and what Washington, D.C.,
was like.
On the other side of the
violence of 1919,
with the country's redoubled
commitment to white supremacy,
segregation was so deeply
embedded
that it was hard to imagine
how it would be undone.
NARRATOR:
57 years after the end
of the Civil War,
Lincoln was still widely revered
among African Americans.
But over time,
white Americans had crafted
a very different memory of
Lincoln,
and of the Civil War itself.
LENTZ-SMITH:
By 1922, the narrative
of the Civil War
as a tragic break among
white men
in which enslaved people have no
speaking role
that is firmly in place.
We'll get to the point
where people are saying
the Civil War was never
about slavery.
And so Lincoln as the
Great Emancipator
is gone out of the narrative.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Lincoln will be remembered
in history
not as having freed men
from slavery,
President Harding
told the audience,
but as having kept
the Union intact.
By erasing emancipation,
the veneration of Lincoln
could be squared
with the subjugation
of Black Americans.
The only African-American
speaker that afternoon
was Dr. Robert Moton, the
president of Tuskegee Institute.
"This memorial is but
a hollow mockery,
Moton wrote in the draft
of his speech,
"a symbol of hypocrisy,
"unless we can make real
in our national life
the things for which he died."
But Moton's draft was censored
by the event's organizers.
Only a bland tribute
to Lincoln remained.
(band plays
"My Country, 'Tis Of Thee")
When the ceremony was over,
the U.S. Marine Band
struck up "My Country,
'Tis of Thee,"
and the crowd began
drifting away.
♪♪
The Black press was outraged
by the dedication,
and by the revision of history.
The "Chicago Defender"
urged African Americans
to boycott the Memorial;
"Pass the shrine by,"
it advised.
"Later on, let us dedicate that
temple thus far only opened."
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Following her harrowing
experience in Chicago,
Anderson threw herself
into a series of short concert
tours of the Upper South,
traveling with an accompanist
on a circuit of historically
Black colleges,
theaters, and churches.
THURMAN:
We forget, or perhaps
we don't know,
that there were vibrant
Black communities
organized around
classical music,
and that there were
Negro symphony orchestras
and there were Negro
string quartets.
And people would organize
opera performances
with entirely Black audiences
and entirely Black musicians
performing.
♪♪
CAPLAN:
They didn't make a lot of money.
But at the same time they were
welcomed warmly and treated
with extreme respect
and commitment
by the audiences they had
in these settings.
♪♪
SHARON VRIEND ROBINETTE:
Music was her refuge.
So she cocooned herself on
one level.
But she was also a risk taker.
She had to support herself
and her family
in a time when there was
a dual legal system,
a dual political system,
and harsh segregation
and violence
against African Americans.
THURMAN:
Being beaten up on the street,
of lynchings,
rape happened constantly
in the 1920s and '30s.
Her first time going to the
South, she couldn't sleep
because she'd heard stories
about white passengers
coming to the African-American
section of the train
and throwing passengers
out of the train.
And so she was terrified that
that could happen to her.
(bell ringing)
BROWN:
Early on, during those tours
when she was on trains,
the cars were dirty,
and didn't have a bathroom,
and they didn't have access
to food.
She went through the trenches.
(train horn blares)
(bell tolls)
♪♪
NARRATOR:
If Anderson was ever to move
beyond this grueling circuit,
she would need professional
training.
Despite her stunningly beautiful
voice,
Anderson knew that she couldn't
bring music to life
the way her idol Roland Hayes
did.
(Hayes singing "Du bist die Ruh"
in German)
ANDERSON (dramatized):
Roland Hayes sang in such
a convincing manner,
and with such beauty,
that each song had a picture,
whether it was in German
or French or Italian.
(Hayes singing in German)
It might be a person who
is very distressed
or wild or something of the
sort,
or other things he did in such
a caressing manner.
You knew immediately what
the thing conveyed to you.
(Hayes singing continues)
(song ends)
CAPLAN:
She wasn't about spectacle
or glamour.
And this music, German lieder,
that's so much about
interiority and the self,
it really fits with who she was.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
It took some work persuading
Giuseppe Boghetti
to even grant an audition;
he was one of the busiest vocal
coaches in the Northeast.
But Anderson quickly became
his star student.
Together they worked on
vocal projection,
agility, and balance.
Boghetti also introduced her
to the languages required
of a classical performer,
with one glaring exception:
Anderson learned not a word
of German,
the language of the lieder
she hoped to master.
Life wasn't all work.
Some afternoons a tall,
light-skinned, young Black man
came by the Anderson home.
He and Marian would listen
to records together
on his Victrola.
Orpheus Fisher came
from a well-to-do family
and was studying to be an
architect.
"I felt quite interested
that he was interested,"
Anderson recalled.
But then Orpheus caught Marian
by surprise.
MARIAN ANDERSON (dramatized):
He came along
and asked me one day if I would
run off with him and marry.
Well, the thought of it just
terrified me.
And I knew the things that
people do expect
when they get married.
I could see that I would have
to give up my work.
And I just wasn't prepared
for it.
ROBINETTE:
She had the opportunity
to be a successful architect's
wife
or to take a risk and become
a career musician.
And that was not written
in stone at that point.
KIRA THURMAN:
She was
deeply in love
with Orpheus Fisher
and could have easily imagined
settling down,
perhaps having children.
But instead, she made a choice
to pursue her career
in a world that was hostile
to Black women.
NARRATOR:
In fact, by the fall of 1923,
Anderson's career seemed to be
reaching a tipping point.
Her concert tours were getting
longer, fees were rising.
And most exciting of all,
she had received an invitation
from the Victor Talking
Machine Company.
Twenty years earlier phonographs
had been mere novelties;
a recording might sell
a few dozen copies.
But that changed in 1904,
when Victor recorded an Italian
tenor, Enrico Caruso,
singing what was called
"high-class music."
(Enrico Caruso singing
"Vesti la giubba" in Italian)
NARRATOR:
Three years later,
Caruso would sell a million
copies of a single aria,
Victor was one of the biggest
companies in the world,
and opera was mainstream.
("Vesti la giubba" ends)
CAPLAN:
The notion of being able to put
on a recording of a great artist
in your home was something
totally new.
So classical music
and classical artists
become much more popular.
This is a really profound
transformation.
It was really a part of
mass culture.
NARRATOR:
By the early 1920s,
record companies were
popularizing new styles
of music,
and targeting specific markets,
including racial
and ethnic groups.
So the artist and repertoire
department at Victor
was primed when they heard of
an exciting young Black singer.
On the 10th of December 1923,
Marian Anderson was led into
a recording studio
at Victor's New Jersey
headquarters,
where she positioned herself
in front of a recording horn
as the small orchestra crowded
in around her.
MARIAN ANDERSON:
Deep river ♪
My home is over ♪
NARRATOR:
Anderson always sang a group
of what were called Negro
spirituals in her concerts,
arrangements by Black composers
of the religious songs
that had given solace
to their forebears.
They had never before been
recorded
by a major American label.
THURMAN:
What Marian Anderson did,
along with Roland Hayes
in the 1920s and '30s,
was really popularize
African-American spirituals
and bringing them to
white audiences.
At a time when Black women
and Black musicians
were just so denigrated,
she made this argument,
over and over again,
that African-American music
was worth celebrating,
and that it was just as elevated
as the music of Beethoven
or Mozart.
ANDERSON:
Deep ♪
JONES:
She had a huge investment
in translating the dignity
of a people onto
the concert stage.
(Anderson singing)
This was the sound and echo
of a rural and slave past,
confident,
strong, and imaginative,
a reflection of the people
to themselves.
Marian Anderson challenged
and broadened people's ideas
of what the souls of Black folk
looked and sounded like.
(Anderson singing)
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Three months after her
recording session,
Anderson's first record was out.
She was hailed
by the Black press
as the greatest colored
contralto of her generation,
and she packed the Renaissance
Dance Hall in Harlem.
This was the pinnacle
of Black entertainment,
but Anderson wanted more.
The time had come, as she put
it, to take a plunge downtown.
The odds of an African-American
artist gaining a mainstream,
crossover audience were
vanishingly small,
but that is exactly
what Anderson had in mind.
She placed her bets on a concert
at New York's Town Hall
in April.
This, as far as the white press
was concerned,
would be her concert debut.
No sooner had Anderson begun
rehearsing
a highly ambitious program
than word came that Orpheus
had married another woman.
Anderson had been putting
Orpheus off for years,
but still the news hurt
Not only was his new bride
wealthy, she was white.
Orpheus's pale skin made
it possible to pass for white.
Faced with his own challenges
as a budding architect,
he decided to do just that.
On the surface at least,
Anderson swept the pain aside,
as she always did.
"He had his life," she said,
"and I had mine."
(car engines rumbling)
Anderson threw herself into
the Town Hall rehearsals.
The promoter reported that
the tickets were selling out,
and Boghetti soothed her worries
about the four German lieder
she was to sing.
MARIAN ANDERSON (dramatized):
I am sure that I did not know
one word of German at the time.
Now the awkward part is that
your accents go in the
wrong places.
However Mr. Boghetti gave me
to believe
that it was not bad at all
As a matter of fact,
he said it was fine.
NARRATOR:
On the evening
of April 10, 1924,
Anderson walked onstage
for her New York debut.
"I felt for all the world,"
she said, "like a prima donna."
She was sold a bill of goods,
that this was
a sold-out concert,
and that she would finally make
a debut to a packed house.
♪♪
It was definitely not
a packed house.
NARRATOR:
Anderson was stunned.
"All the enthusiasm that I had
built up
seemed to fall at my feet,"
she remembered.
The real problem came when she
sang the group of German lieder.
"Miss Anderson betrayed a sad
want of understanding
"of the deeper meanings
of the lyrics
and of lied interpretation,"
one critic wrote.
"She should devote more time
to study," wrote another,
"and less to the concert stage."
BROWN:
She was always used
to the glowing review.
Everywhere else she had sung,
whatever mistakes in grammar
or in breathing or in diction
that were made,
they were always excused.
But New York City, at Town Hall,
she was under a bigger
microscope
and the critics picked
her apart.
NARRATOR:
For 12 years, Anderson had
struggled to overcome the hurdle
that had been so casually
thrown up
by a Philadelphia music school.
She had been denied the
opportunity to study music,
and no amount of talent or hard
work could disguise the fact.
She retreated from the
music scene.
ANDERSON (dramatized):
I didn't want to see music.
I didn't want to hear it.
I was pretty sure that I would
choose something else
as my life's ambition.
NARRATOR:
Anderson's seclusion
lasted for months,
until self-doubt gave way
to a new realization.
"Music was something that I sort
of had to do," she said.
"It wouldn't let me rest."
Her return to the grind of small
tours only convinced Anderson
that her future lay elsewhere.
(ship horn blares)
♪♪
On the evening
of October 22, 1927,
Marian Anderson
gathered her bags,
made her way to the piers
on Manhattan's west side,
and boarded the Ile de France
as it sailed for England,
and a new beginning.
THURMAN:
If she kept going as she did
in the United States,
she would only, sort of, have
access to certain music halls,
to certain teachers,
to certain audiences.
She was already starting
to see the successes
of other African-American
musicians in Europe.
Roland Hayes was already there,
and by 1924,
he was making about
$100,000 a year.
So why not go?
♪♪
BROWN:
The lack of formal education
in music
always dogged her in the back
of her mind
That she wasn't good enough,
that she couldn't speak
different languages well enough,
that she didn't
know everything that
her white cohorts knew.
She decided to educate herself
where a Black person
could excel.
NARRATOR:
Anderson's journey began with
some time-honored rites
of passage
for American tourists abroad:
while still at sea,
she was insulted by one of the
ship's French waiters
for ordering her steak
very well done.
He looked at me in disgust,
she recounted, and said,
"You could never be the wife
of a Frenchman."
(horn honking)
Anderson's first stop
was London, where Roland Hayes
had lined up teachers, housing,
and introductions.
Although the city was hardly
free of racism,
it wasn't so ubiquitous,
and rarely so dangerous,
as back home.
(party chatter fades)
THURMAN:
She could stay at any hotel.
She could walk into any shop
and not, sort of,
face harassment.
And then on top of that,
she's finding this really
vibrant,
active Black community.
(horses trotting)
LENTZ-SMITH:
London has its own
imperial history,
but that also means it has
other Black communities
and a fertile
and bubbling politics
of imperial critique
or Black solidarity.
Whether you buy into it or not,
you're exposed to it,
and it starts moving
blinders off
what you imagine Black folks
can do in the world.
There is this eye-popping sense
of possibility.
(bell tolls)
NARRATOR:
The entanglements of Anderson's
old life were slipping away.
Orpheus Fisher
had started writing again
after his first marriage
fell apart.
But for now,
his letters went unanswered.
♪♪
In London, and later in Berlin,
Anderson plunged into the
education
she had been denied at home.
(Anderson singing "Der Tod und
das Madchen" in German)
(singing continues)
CAROL OJA:
Her use of her voice
became more sophisticated.
Her capacity to deal with
foreign language texts,
especially German,
was enhanced a lot.
In general,
she grew as an artist.
An edge came to her work that
hadn't been possible before.
(singing continues)
CAPLAN:
She could do anything from a
much lower female vocal range
to the highest notes.
But the kind of home
of her voice
was in this lower range,
and that's what really made
her stand out.
(song ends)
(train rumbling)
NARRATOR:
This new Marian Anderson began
performing more frequently,
and audiences took notice.
♪♪
UREÑA:
She goes to Finland and Sweden
and it was really quite amazing
how she caught on.
She just has this wild
following.
NARRATOR:
Anderson toured Scandinavia
for seven months non-stop,
116 concerts.
The papers called it
"Marian fever."
I love the idea of that,
in the early '30s
that people are catching
this fever.
She was almost in a different
city every day,
even giving multiple recitals
a day.
MARIAN ANDERSON (dramatized):
There were some things
in England
that did not feel
that different from America.
But in Scandinavia, I had the
feeling that I was very free
and absolutely at home.
Her time in Europe allowed
her to have
many experiences,
one of which is the opportunity
to come of age,
to get that backpack moment
where you get to explore
and just be.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
In May of 1934,
Anderson arrived in Paris,
still the capital of
European art,
and a far more intimidating
prospect
for a young artist than Helsinki
or Stockholm.
Anderson's first concert
there was poorly attended,
but then word began to spread.
♪♪
A second concert almost
sold out,
and the third was a sensation.
"It can safely be said,"
one critic wrote,
"that Marian Anderson triumphed
through sheer artistry."
♪♪
As further confirmation
that she had arrived,
in Paris, Anderson signed with
the most successful talent agent
in the world.
When she had approached
Sol Hurok a few years earlier,
he wasn't interested.
Now this rising star was
a very different proposition.
OJA:
Sol Hurok was the most prominent
impresario of his day.
And they formed this very
trusting alliance.
He treated her with the kind
of dignity and respect
that she deserved.
♪♪
(train rumbling)
NARRATOR:
Anderson circled back through
Scandinavia,
then Warsaw, Vienna,
Prague, Leningrad, and Moscow.
Her career was booming,
she was making real money,
she was young and beautiful.
♪♪
(laughing):
There were so many men
following her around.
And she totally knew it.
There was definitely a baron.
And this might perhaps be
shocking,
but I think she kind of strung
him along.
So he just followed her around
like a lovesick puppy.
There are all kinds of different
accounts
of suitors everywhere
that she went.
We've kind of made Marian
Anderson out to be a saint
because she sort of presented
herself with so much dignity.
But she was a flesh and blood
woman.
(Anderson singing "Schumann,
Helft Mir Ihr Schwestern")
JILLIAN PATRICIA PIRTLE:
She was a tall woman.
She had this lovely, coarse,
curly hair
that she would like to put in
finger wave curls of the 1920s.
And she kept that look,
basically,
most of her life.
(laughs)
Because it was sophisticated,
it was elegant, it was modest.
And there wasn't a day
that passed,
when she finally could
afford it,
that she didn't wear
red nail polish.
OJA:
The recognition that she
received in Europe
just made a huge difference,
not only in her career,
but in her sense of herself.
She was no longer a struggling
girl from Philadelphia,
she was a singer of renown.
(Anderson continues singing)
Suddenly she was a diva.
(song ends)
(training rumbling)
NARRATOR:
In June of 1934,
while Anderson was conquering
Paris,
17 of Germany's leading lawyers
gathered in Berlin
to draft a set of laws for
the country's new government.
(steam hisses)
♪♪
Adolf Hitler's Nazis had taken
power the previous year,
promising a new racial order.
The conference began with a
lengthy presentation
on the race laws of the
United States,
the one country,
Hitler had said,
that was making progress toward
his vision of a racist society.
America's implementation of
second-class citizenship
for non-whites, its laws on
racial classification,
intermarriage,
segregation and immigration,
were all studied and debated
by the men who were drafting
what became known as the
Nuremburg Race Laws.
LENTZ-SMITH:
You see Europe go from being
a place of possibility,
of ferment,
of unburdening and freedom,
to doors closing,
to things in the 1930s
that look like cousins
of Jim Crow.
♪♪
THURMAN:
With the rise of the Nazi party
and with the rise of far-right
racism and nationalism,
being a person of color
in Europe
was becoming increasingly
difficult.
It's not just anti-Semitism
that's a problem,
even though that is, of course,
a real problem.
There's also the problem of
anti-Black racism on the ground.
Being a Black woman walking
around on the streets
just meant that you had a target
on your back all the time.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
By 1935 Anderson had been
effectively barred
from Germany for being
insufficiently Aryan,
and then excluded
from Austria's prestigious
Salzburg Music Festival.
A friend defied the authorities
by arranging for her to sing
in the ballroom of a
Salzburg hotel.
Anderson insisted
on keeping the date,
even though the last
Black singer who had performed
in the city had been run out
by Nazi thugs.
(car horn honks)
♪♪
CAPLAN:
Marian Anderson was never going
to have a place that she could
walk into without having
to really fight for it.
But her sense of being true
to herself,
of letting her actions and her
artistry speak for themselves,
is what I find most impressive
about her.
THURMAN:
Marian Anderson is willing
to show up,
and she must show up,
to indicate that she is not
going to accept the terms
of social inequality,
of artistic inequality.
I think that says a lot
about who she was,
her insistence on demonstrating
her dignity
in the midst of such harsh
racial oppression and violence.
NARRATOR:
News of Anderson's concert
spread through Salzburg.
Anti-fascist musicians
made a point to attend.
THURMAN:
It was a political gesture,
thumbing of their nose,
so to speak,
at the Salzburg Festival.
She's in front of, like,
the elite musicians.
Bruno Walter, Arturo Toscanini,
Lotte Lehmann I mean, all of
these sort of huge superstars
are sitting front row
in her concert.
I mean, that's-that's wild.
Toscanini was the rock star
among conductors,
one of the towering figures in
the operatic scene of the time.
NARRATOR:
Toscanini was a compelling
personality on and offstage.
An outspoken critic of
Mussolini,
he refused to ever play
the fascist anthem,
even after being beaten
in the street
by supporters of the dictator.
And now he was waiting to hear
Marian Anderson.
"I was in quite a state
by the time
I went up on the stage,"
Anderson remembered.
"I knew that this was the
supreme offering,
one might hope to give."
ANDERSON:
They crucified ♪
My Lord ♪
And he never ♪
NARRATOR:
Hardly anybody in the audience
understood English well enough
to follow what she was saying,
a spectator wrote.
(Anderson singing emotively)
And yet the immense sorrow
was enough.
What Anderson did was outside
the limits of music.
(Anderson singing and holding
last note)
(applause)
Following her performance,
Anderson was flustered to see
Toscanini making his way through
the throng of admirers.
"What I heard today,"
he told her,
"one is privileged to hear once
in a hundred years."
In Sol Hurok's hands, it became
Marian Anderson's catchphrase:
from that day forward she would
be known as
the Voice of the Century.
(ship horn blaring)
NARRATOR:
At the end of 1935,
Anderson boarded
the Ile de France once more,
and sailed for home.
(waves crashing)
Her new manager, Sol Hurok,
had convinced the singer
to begin the homecoming tour
at New York's Town Hall,
where her career had nearly
ended 12 years before.
♪♪
"Let it be said at the outset,"
the "New York Times" proclaimed,
"Marian Anderson has returned
to her native land
"one of the great singers
of our time.
"In the last four years
"Europe has acclaimed this tall,
handsome girl.
It is time for her own country
to honor her."
Even the notoriously
self-critical singer
allowed herself a little praise:
"There were some songs,"
she admitted,
"which I definitely felt were
not badly done."
From New York,
to an emotional homecoming
concert in Philadelphia,
back to New York for a packed
show at Carnegie Hall,
Anderson was a sensation.
THURMAN:
It must have been surreal.
She had been trying and working
so hard and for so long
to establish herself as a
serious artist
and then to have her career
kind of explode
and become even bigger than
perhaps she'd even imagined.
CAPLAN:
I think it was a whirlwind,
being catapulted into this
touring life
that was so different from the
life she'd had before leaving.
These were not the kind of
stay with someone who's part of
the church
and pay your own travel
challenges
she had faced earlier.
This was a much more kind of
elite and comfortable situation.
BROWN:
To come home
and see your face
in the "New York Times,"
and everybody knows your name
when you walk into a room,
I could imagine that was a time
that was heady.
NARRATOR:
At the age of 39,
Anderson was more famous
than ever,
billed, with a nod to Toscanini,
as the Voice of the Century.
She was rich, too.
In 1938 Anderson earned
$238,000,
while the average American
was making $7,000 a year.
But for all that,
she was still a second-class
citizen in her own country.
LENTZ-SMITH:
It's always good to have money,
right?
But she is still Black
and she is still a woman.
And so she is still
vulnerable to the pettiness,
to the dictates over where
she can perform
and where she can't perform.
Hurok would make all these
travel arrangements
so that she would be
less subject to the indignities
of Jim Crow travel in the
United States.
It didn't always work.
She would often eat meals
in her hotel room
so as not to have to navigate
the world
of segregated restaurants
in various places.
NARRATOR:
Everywhere she traveled in
America,
the color of Anderson's skin
shaped the way she ate, slept,
socialized, and worked.
In the South,
except for a few big cities,
she was limited to the
old circuit
of Black colleges and churches.
Elsewhere the practice of
segregation
was mind-numbingly complex.
♪♪
OJA:
Segregation varied
from city to city, state
to state, decade to decade.
There were endless varieties.
A performer crossing a
state line
could go from one world
to another.
CAPLAN:
Many, many, many halls
and not just in the South,
were segregated, but they were
not all segregated
in the same way.
There were kind of two systems
known as horizontal and vertical
segregation,
meaning whether the hall was
kind of split down the middle
or horizontal,
which is orchestra section
versus balcony section.
NARRATOR:
One way or another, every time
Anderson walked onstage,
she looked out over an audience
that had been sorted in some
fashion by race.
THURMAN:
Marian Anderson was not somebody
who was ever very comfortable
speaking out on the profound
problems
of institutional racism in the
United States.
Her activism centered very much
on her musicianship,
on her insistence on
being understood and treated
as an artist
at a time when,
in the United States
and around the world,
there's such a strong denial
of Black creativity
and Black genius
and Black excellence.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Anderson almost always
kept her guard up,
but she was moved to tears
onstage one evening,
while singing a spiritual.
ANDERSON:
I've never been to heaven,
but I've been told ♪
Trying to make heaven my home,
hallelujah ♪
(dramatized):
The song is "I'm Trampin'."
Trampin' ♪
Trying to make heaven
my home ♪
Now, on that particular
occasion,
there were lots of things that
were bound up,
the things that were pleasant,
the things that might not have
been so pleasant.
And I saw an army of people who
were bowed down,
whose only solace
whose only way of being free
was to march along on this road.
♪♪
OJA:
In April of 1939,
there is a letter to the editor
in the "New York Times,"
written by someone in Houston.
And according to him,
when Anderson came onstage,
she politely looked at the white
side very quickly.
NARRATOR:
"Miss Anderson then turned
deliberately toward those
of her own race,"
the author continued,
"and bowed very low and long.
"It was the most beautiful
and most queenly gesture
I've ever seen."
LENTZ-SMITH:
Offering herself to that
white audience
with the minimum amount
of deference
versus offering herself
to the Black audience
in a kind of bow that says,
"I see you and I'm with you,"
you think, that speaks volumes.
It allows people to see a way
both to maneuver segregation
with dignity,
but also on some level to begin
flicking at its edges
so that it's not as fully intact
at the end of the evening
as it was at the beginning.
And I think that that is
strategic,
it's subtle,
and I think it's admirable.
NARRATOR:
In January of 1939,
while Anderson was away
on a concert tour,
a series of events began
unfolding in Washington
that would pull her
to the center
of the fight for civil rights,
and change her life forever.
♪♪
Prior to the tour,
Anderson had agreed to sing a
benefit for Howard University
A bastion of Black culture
and activism
On April 9, Easter Sunday.
CAPLAN:
Anderson performed a lot of
concerts at Black institutions
as a way of kind of maintaining
that connection
to Black audiences.
She had been the recipient
of so much support
from churches
and Black organizations.
Now she was kind of giving back.
NARRATOR:
The trick for
the administrators at Howard
was finding a venue that would
hold the kind of crowd
Anderson was sure to draw.
OJA:
This is before
the Kennedy Center existed.
Big venues which were intended
to be concert halls
for the people had not yet
been built.
So that in Washington, D.C.,
for any major performer,
for a symphony orchestra,
an opera company,
anything of the sort,
Constitution Hall was it.
NARRATOR:
Constitution Hall had been built
in the late 1920s
by the Daughters of
the American Revolution
to host their annual
conventions.
When the D.A.R. wasn't using it,
the 3,700-seat venue was rented
to performers
they considered suitably
wholesome, cultured,
and white.
CAPLAN:
Segregation in
Washington theaters
and entertainment spaces was
pervasive but not consistent.
There were a lot of halls that
would allow Black performers,
but not Black audiences.
And then there were some halls
like Constitution Hall
that would only allow
white performers.
NARRATOR:
Howard University
decided to test
the D.A.R.'s whites-only policy,
hoping that they would make
an exception
for the highest-paid singer
in the world,
the Voice of the Century.
The rejection was both
commonplace and appalling.
Even by the standards
of Jim Crow,
the insult to Anderson
stood out.
The head of the
National Association
for the Advancement
of Colored People,
Walter White,
couldn't let it go.
♪♪
White had grown up in Atlanta
defined by law and custom
as colored,
despite his blond hair
and blue eyes.
But for White, any doubts
about his own identity
were burned away when he was
ten years old,
during the Atlanta Massacre
of 1906.
LENTZ-SMITH:
He writes in his autobiography
of mobs
advancing on his neighborhood,
advancing on his family home.
That, for him,
is a formative moment.
Walter White could have passed
out of
the travails and troubles
of African American-ness
if he chose to but he didn't.
That kind of commitment to the
Black freedom struggle
and to Blackness itself
is really significant.
NARRATOR:
In 1918, when White was
24 years old,
he took a job with the NAACP
in New York.
The organization had been
created nine years earlier
by a small, interracial group
of reformers,
to promote social
and political equality.
But there were just six
full-time staff members
at the main office,
waging an unequal struggle
against white supremacy.
White played a unique role,
risking his life to expose
the depravity
at the heart of America's
racial order.
BLACK:
He would investigate lynchings
by passing as white.
And he would stay until people
really ran him out.
And then he would haul butt
to Washington or to New York
with eyewitness reports,
to document this incredibly
violent and shocking issue.
NARRATOR:
White chronicled
the Red Summer of 1919.
He'd been in Chicago to report
on the rioting
that enveloped Marian Anderson's
concert there.
During the Harlem Renaissance
of the 1920s,
White was at the heart of the
NAACP's campaign
to promote Black artists.
So he was in Town Hall that
night in the spring of 1925,
watched Marian Anderson endure
her painful setback.
He helped coax her back
to the stage then
by inviting her to sing at an
NAACP gathering.
As the years passed
and White took over the
leadership of the organization,
he continued to follow her
career, as he said,
"with more than ordinary
interest."
♪♪
So when Howard University called
about her concert
in the winter of 1939,
he was all ears.
LENTZ-SMITH:
Marian Anderson would have
appealed to Walter White
because her music was more
high art than low.
This wasn't race music,
this wasn't jazz.
It wasn't blues.
She spoke
across race lines in a way that
nicely dovetailed
with the NAACP's vision
of itself and its mission.
NARRATOR:
Although Anderson
embodied the NAACP's ideals,
her case wasn't tailor-made
for the organization.
Picking a public fight with
a well-connected,
private group was not
their line of work.
But the civil rights landscape
was being reshaped by
events overseas.
♪♪
THURMAN:
By 1939, African Americans
were drawing parallels
between what they called
Nazi German Jim Crow laws
and Jim Crow laws in the
United States.
♪♪
NEWSREEL REPORTER:
New York.
100,000 parade in great protest
against Hitler's treatment
of the Jews in Germany.
ROBINETTE:
Many European Americans
wanted to distance themselves
from Nazism,
which was on the rise within
Germany
and other parts of Europe.
And that, of course,
is a challenge because
the racist structures
within the United States
were not dissimilar
than Nazi Germany in 1939.
LENTZ-SMITH:
Think about the symbology of it
being Constitution Hall,
the fact that it's the Daughters
of the American Revolution.
You can sort of draw on it
rhetorically
to point out America's
hypocrisy,
to remind white Americans
of their stated ideals.
Marian Anderson is this
beautiful symbol
of what America could be
in a moment
when the politics of
anti-fascism
are playing in with the politics
of anti-racism.
NARRATOR:
The NAACP was in.
White started working the
phones.
It was a measure of his network
that one of his first calls was
to the White House,
and the D.A.R.'s most
illustrious,
most reluctant member.
BLACK:
By the late '30s,
Eleanor Roosevelt had a close
personal friendship
with Walter White.
So close that they would call
each other
Walter and Eleanor, which is
so rare for both of them.
Walter White knows that
Eleanor's ties
with the D.A.R.
are loose at best.
Eleanor did not even fill out
her own application to the
D.A.R.,
she just signed it.
So Walter White says,
"Okay, will you resign?
Will you resign?"
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Roosevelt turned down
White’s suggestion,
but lent her name to the cause,
kicking off a campaign
to pressure the D.A.R.
Secretary of the Interior
Harold Ickes
appealed to the D.A.R. directly,
as did Sol Hurok.
Meanwhile some of the most
famous musicians in the world
At White's urging
Began denouncing the D.A.R.,
and the controversy surfaced
in the press.
"Constitution Hall stands almost
in the shadow of the
Lincoln Memorial,"
the "Washington Times-Herald"
declared,
"but the Great Emancipator's
sentiments
"are not shared
by the Daughters.
Prejudice rules to comfort
Hitler."
Still, there was no response
from the Daughters.
(marching band playing)
(applause)
NARRATOR:
The Daughters of the
American Revolution
had every reason
to feel invulnerable.
A whites-only policy was hardly
unusual in Washington.
♪♪
Not only were most performance
spaces segregated,
so were schools, hotels,
movie theaters, restaurants,
the federal government itself.
Segregation was ubiquitous
in the nation's capital.
Protests were rare
and usually ineffective.
Besides, as a private
organization,
the Daughters
were legally entitled
to run Constitution Hall
as they saw fit.
So even as Walter White
was readying
an assault on the D.A.R.,
Marian Anderson's concert
was no great concern
to its new president,
Sarah Robert.
DENISE VANBUREN:
Sarah Robert
was to be our Golden Jubilee
President General.
She was to manage a great
celebration for three years
marking 50 years of D.A.R.
service to America.
I don't think that she could
possibly have seen
what was about to occur.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
By the time the D.A.R.
board met on February 1,
the situation was escalating.
"I think we will ask to have
the doors closed,"
Robert told the 40 women
present.
"The question we are about
to take up
is a very serious problem."
Robert didn't voice her opinion
on the matter,
but the manager of Constitution
Hall, Fred Hand, did,
and left a written account
of his thoughts.
"The organization is trying to
wreck the way of American life,"
he said of the NAACP.
"The National Society must not
be weak enough
to submit to intimidation."
The issue was decided
by secret ballot:
39 of the 41 women voted to
retain the whites-only policy.
(car horns honking)
(indistinct chatter)
♪♪
Two weeks after the vote,
the D.A.R. issued a
press release that implied
it was simply conforming
to municipal law.
VANBUREN:
Even within the D.A.R.,
there is often a lot
of confusion
and misinformation.
It was not the law of the
District of Columbia,
nor of the United States.
As disappointing as it is to us,
this was a policy.
It was a policy choice
by the Daughters of the
American Revolution.
BLACK:
If there is a case study
on how not to handle
controversy,
it's the way the D.A.R. handled
Marian Anderson in 1939.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
By the end of February
the NAACP's campaign
was floundering.
Not only was the D.A.R.
immovable,
they'd been vindicated
when the Board of Education
barred Anderson from performing
in the auditorium of a
whites-only high school.
Above all,
the NAACP had failed to generate
any interest outside of
Washington, D.C.
But on the 27th of February,
almost two months after the
controversy began,
the situation
was completely transformed.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt,
an honorary member
of the D.A.R.,
announced in her nationally
syndicated newspaper column
that she had resigned from
the organization in protest.
BLACK:
That column then makes
the Marian Anderson
concert national.
Eleanor Roosevelt
turned the discrimination that
Marian Anderson encountered
from the D.A.R.
into a public conversation
on talent and race and justice.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Marian Anderson first learned
of Roosevelt's move
when she noticed a headline
while on her way
to a rehearsal in San Francisco.
Nobody had bothered to alert her
to the two-month-old
controversy.
"I made no decisions in what
they were doing," she said.
Suddenly a crowd of reporters
wanted answers.
"I'm shocked to be barred
from the capital
of my own country,"
Anderson recited from a script
Hurok had written,
"after having appeared
"in almost every other capital
of the world.
"For details of the case,
please refer to my manager
in New York."
In the wake of Roosevelt's
resignation,
the D.A.R. came under
withering assault.
Some felt that while the
condemnation was well-earned,
the rest of white society
was getting a pass.
"If Mrs. Roosevelt took out
after everything
like that in Washington D.C.,"
writer and activist
Zora Neale Hurston wrote,
"she would be hollering
night and day.
"Restaurants, theaters
"everything in downtown
Washington practices Jim Crow.
"I can't recall that
Mrs. Roosevelt
"campaigned mightily against
those places,
as she did against the D.A.R."
LENTZ-SMITH:
I do think Eleanor Roosevelt
did a good thing.
But when she went after
the D.A.R.,
Hurston was quick to name
the hypocrisy of holding one
person up
while letting everybody
else off.
NARRATOR:
The story of Marian Anderson
and the D.A.R.
ran in the papers,
week after week.
Already it was a huge victory
for the NAACP,
but still, there was nowhere
for Anderson to sing.
At the beginning of March,
Walter White had an inspiration
that transcended the
whole debate:
a free outdoor concert
at the Lincoln Memorial.
It had been 17 years since
the Memorial opened
with a segregated ceremony and
an homage to white supremacy.
Now Marian Anderson would
rededicate it as a monument
to freedom and justice,
to the better angels
of our natures.
On March 13 the board of the
NAACP ratified White's proposal.
But nobody had any idea how to
get permission for such an event
from the federal government
Nobody had ever tried.
Once again, White leaned
on his connections:
Harold Ickes, a longtime ally
and now FDR's
Secretary of the Interior,
took the matter straight
to the White House.
"She can sing from the top
of the Washington Monument
if she wants to,"
President Roosevelt replied.
Hurok made the announcement
to the "New York Times"
on the 21st of March.
It was three days later
that Walter White finally
told Marian Anderson about it.
She was given the choice
of backing out,
but that train had all
but left the station.
"Regardless of my feelings in
the matter," she later recalled,
it would not have been
right to run away from it."
♪♪
LENTZ-SMITH:
She's no dummy, right?
Because she understands
the utility of it to the NAACP
and perhaps to African Americans
more broadly.
But that doesn't necessarily
mean that
it's doing much for her, right?
On some level,
it's not her story.
Anyone's bound to feel
ambivalent
about not being the protagonist
in their own life.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Nobody knew what to expect;
there had never been an occasion
like this before.
But now it was thrilling just
to be there,
to catch the first sight
of the Lincoln Memorial,
to become one with the crowd
and watch it grow,
to feel the strength
in its numbers.
At some point on that
Easter Sunday,
it became one of the largest
gatherings ever in the
nation's capital,
eclipsing the mark set
15 years earlier
by a rally of the Ku Klux Klan.
Howard University did
a great job
in terms of getting the
word out.
The NAACP,
the mine workers,
the Pullman Porters,
all of these organizations
spread the word
in very traditional ways.
ROBINETTE:
There was great outcry in the
press, in part framed
to say, "Come and protest
this discrimination
because the United States should
not be associated with Nazism."
♪♪
BLACK:
The concert stays on
the front pages of newspapers
in the country for six weeks.
And it's positive press
coverage.
Most southern newspapers
editorialized in support of it.
I mean, just, that’s stunning.
(crowd chatter)
NARRATOR:
Anderson had come here for the
sound check earlier in the day;
had tried out the microphones,
looked out over the empty Mall.
But when she was driven back
for the concert,
the sight of the crowd
took her breath away.
ANDERSON (dramatized):
I had such a feeling
that I had never had before.
I just couldn't say anything.
And I remember that there were
policemen who came to the car
and escorted me to the monument.
We went into a little room
behind there.
BLACK:
You know, she'd sung to three,
4,000, you know, maybe 5,000.
But this is 75,000 people.
And they'd been standing outside
for hours.
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Anderson would be
surrounded onstage
by 200 public figures
who had signed up
as co-sponsors of the event,
ranging from
Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black
to movie star Tallulah Bankhead.
(applause)
ANDERSON (dramatized):
Then came the signal
that we were to go out.
My heart was throbbing
to the point
that I could scarcely
hear anything.
(cheers and applause)
BROWN:
She steps down those stairs,
and she lifts her head up, and
she begins to look out on
the sea of people.
(cheers and applause)
The diversity in that crowd
was astonishing.
CAPLAN:
She looks very majestic,
but she seems very small
against this
vast, vast white background
of this
hyper-symbolic space.
The anticipation must have been
beyond anything we could
imagine.
RADIO ANNOUNCER:
Good afternoon,
ladies and gentlemen.
We're speaking to you from the
steps of the Lincoln Memorial
in the nation's capital from
which point
the National Broadcasting
Company brings you
a song recital by the gifted
Marian Anderson,
considered by music critics
throughout the world
BLACK:
You had this fear of,
"Oh, my God
Look at the people."
And this irrational hope
that's placed on her.
And you could see
from the films that when she
closes her eyes,
you know, and takes that
first deep breath
My country 'tis of thee ♪
Sweet land of liberty,
to thee we sing ♪
Land where my fathers died ♪
Land of the pilgrim's pride ♪
From every mountainside ♪
Let freedom ring ♪
♪♪
NARRATOR:
"The moment Miss Anderson
started to sing,"
one newsman recounted,
"there descended upon the
multitude a reverent silence."
LENTZ-SMITH:
Can you just imagine
standing amongst 75,000 people
at the Lincoln Memorial,
in 1939, looking at
a Black woman singing?
It's stunning, right?
No matter who you were,
that moment must have felt
amazing.
ANDERSON:
I'm trampin' ♪
Trying to make Heaven
my home ♪
JONES:
She sang of her citizenship as
a person in the United States.
And she sang of her citizenship
as a Black woman.
ANDERSON:
Hallelujah, I'm trampin' ♪
JONES:
Singing the songs of
the Negro spiritual.
If that ain't a Easter Sunday
message, then what is?
She arose, y'all!
ANDERSON:
Trying to make Heaven
my home ♪
NARRATOR:
When she was done,
and on the verge of tears,
Anderson spoke to the crowd
for the first and only time.
"My dear friends," she said,
"I am so overwhelmed
that I cannot express myself.
"I hope you will ever find
me grateful
"for the wonderful things
you have done for me.
Please try to imagine
all the things I cannot say."
♪♪
LENTZ-SMITH:
Within a few days,
there'll be another lynching,
or there'll be the next thing.
But I think it's also true that
Marian Anderson's concert
makes clear the potential
for using publicity
to point out America's
hypocrisy,
to shame white Americans into
living up to their
stated ideals.
Like, it's not the only
strategy,
but coupled with other things,
it is an effective one.
It is inspiration
for other generations
of African American civil rights
activists,
imagining how they might use
these strategies
again in the future.
What this said to the NAACP is
that you can have power
outside the courts.
You can have power outside
a lobbying effort
in the halls of Congress.
That if you build the right
alliances, and you use media
in a new way,
you will begin to have
a new audience,
a wider audience.
Marian Anderson helps
set the stage
for a new conversation
about freedom.
NARRATOR:
By the early 1950s,
the privations of Anderson's
youth were a distant memory.
She was happily married
to her longtime suitor,
Orpheus Fisher.
Days were spent around the pool
at their Connecticut estate,
or hosting family and friends.
♪♪
Anderson was an avid fan of
Jackie Robinson's Dodgers.
When they were playing she could
be found, by her own account,
yelling at the television set
like mad.
Life was easier,
but not always simple.
In all the years since
the Lincoln Memorial concert,
she had never discussed it with
anyone outside her inner circle.
UREÑA:
She skirts the issue
or she finds other ways
of really not commenting
on the controversy itself.
It's fascinating that she could
find ways of avoiding it.
BLACK:
The added responsibilities
that this placed on her
must have had both
a joyful component
and a huge toll at the
same time.
This is not a concert
that you can ever escape.
CAPLAN:
It makes her a celebrity in the
United States in the way that
even a lot of successful tours
and concerts
never could have done.
But it also puts this layer
of political meaning
onto everything that she does.
(bottle breaks, crowd cheers)
ANDERSON (dramatized):
They say, "Now this is the lady
I was telling you about,"
or "This is Marian Anderson."
"Now shake hands with her
and you can always say
that you shook hands with
Marian Anderson."
♪♪
NARRATOR:
Although Anderson
was still lionized,
especially by older Americans,
a new generation was energizing
the civil rights movement,
young people who hadn't been
scarred by Red Summer,
who were frustrated
by the pace of change,
and skeptical of their elders.
Some found that her reticence
was no longer acceptable;
her wealth and comfort bred
resentment
rather than admiration.
In 1951, as part of an NAACP
campaign to end segregation
in performance spaces, Anderson
and other Black artists
were asked to stop playing
in segregated venues.
Anderson refused.
"Miss Anderson's policy
in past years,
Hurok and Anderson explained,
"has resulted
in a vast improvement
"in the relations between
Negro and white
"in the Southern states,
"and has brought the problem
of segregation
"closer to a real solution
than would have been the case
if she had followed
more militant tactics."
♪♪
ROBINETTE:
She was born in 1897,
and grew up at a time
when it was expected that
an African-American woman,
particularly middle-class,
would hold herself with dignity,
with composure,
a very even-keeled personality.
And if one was outspoken,
one ran certain risks
of violence
and limited opportunity.
NARRATOR:
For Anderson,
the threat had been driven home
in 1942, when Roland Hayes
Her lifelong mentor,
and still one of the most famous
Black people in America
Was beaten by police
after his wife and daughter
accidentally sat
in the white section
of a shoe store in Georgia.
But for the NAACP,
the battle against segregated
entertainment was crucial.
Despite the dangers,
celebrities were expected
to play their part.
"The people of the South
are proud of Marian Anderson,"
a field secretary wrote
Walter White,
"but she should not surrender
to segregation,
"lest she destroy
some of the love
these young people have
for her."
In January 1951, the NAACP
boycotted Anderson's concert
in Richmond, Virginia.
Only then did she agree
to join the campaign.
OJA:
It's a painful experience.
The scene is shifting
really fast
and kind of staying ahead of it
must have been tricky.
Just finding ways
to keep performing,
and to stick to your principles.
LENTZ-SMITH:
There's always this question
with these people
who are extraordinary
and who are conscripted
on some level
into these broader freedom
struggles,
whether it's enough to let their
talent do their work.
(car horns honking)
NARRATOR:
Some found Anderson's reticence
disappointing,
but to others it made
her the ideal agent of change.
In 1955,
Anderson was 58 years old,
no longer in her prime vocally,
and she had never performed
in an opera.
But 16 years after the D.A.R.
controversy,
the management of New York
City's Metropolitan Opera
had decided that it was time
to break the color bar,
and they were looking for
the most respected,
least controversial candidate.
♪♪
OJA:
Marian Anderson's debut
at the Metropolitan Opera
in January of 1955
was a very big deal.
The Metropolitan Opera
was then 75 years old.
No singer of color had ever
been featured
on its stage previously,
despite lots of lobbying,
lots of attempts to get them to
change their whites-only policy.
A lot started to change
after that moment.
NARRATOR:
Although Anderson would continue
to perform for another decade,
the Met debut was the capstone
of her career.
Younger stars were taking
center stage.
♪♪
In the civil rights movement,
too,
the torch was passing to a
new generation.
The year that began
with Anderson's Met debut
ended with emergence of
26-year-old
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Onto the national scene.
As we the Negro citizens
of Montgomery, Alabama,
do now and will continue
to carry on our mass protest.
(cheers and applause)
NARRATOR:
King had listened to Anderson's
Easter Sunday concert
on the radio when he was
ten years old.
He had commemorated
it in a high school essay.
Now, though King embraced
tactics
that Anderson had described
as militant,
he revered her still.
So in August 1963,
when King's allies were involved
in planning a
march on Washington,
they reached out to Anderson.
"The entire committee,"
the NAACP's Roy Wilkins wrote,
"unanimously decided that
an invitation to sing
"be extended to you
for this historic occasion."
♪♪
BLACK:
It's no accident that
Martin Luther King
picks the exact spot that
Marian Anderson used
to deliver the
"I Have a Dream" speech.
Those two people,
planting their separate two feet
in the exact same square
on the steps of the
Lincoln Memorial
make it forever the shrine
of racial justice.
♪♪
JILLIAN PATRICIA PIRTLE:
Marian Anderson was that iconic
figure that you could look to
and you could say that because
of what she was able to achieve,
people could hope
that they could
achieve their own greatness.
THURMAN:
How can we make space for
different modes of activism,
different modes of advocacy
and agency,
especially for Black women?
These kinds of moments,
these kinds of demonstrations,
provide us today with a rich
history that we can claim.
We can sort of follow in their
footsteps and in their path
to sort of break new ground.
The work was unfinished in 1939.
It is unfinished today,
but you keep going.
BLACK:
Marian Anderson
understood the power of her
presence.
She understood
in a very personal way
the history and symbolism
that she carries.
What Marian Anderson
is going to say is
my voice is as worthy
if not better than any other
voice in my field
and I must be heard.
♪♪
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