The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America

By Raymond Arsenault

Few moments in Civil Rights history are as important as the morning of Sunday April 9, 1939 when Marian Anderson sang before a throng of thousands lined up along the Mall by the Lincoln Memorial. She had been banned from the Daughters of the American Revolution's Constitution Hall because she was black. When Eleanor Roosevelt, who resigned from the DAR over the incident, took up Anderson's cause, however, it became a national issue. The controversy showed Americans that discrimination was not simply a regional problem. As Arsenault shows, Anderson's dignity and courage enabled her, like a female Jackie Robinson - but several years before him - to strike a vital blow for civil rights.

Today the moment still resonates. Postcards and CDs of Anderson are sold at the Memorial and Anderson is still considered one of the greats of 20th century American music. In a short but richly textured narrative, Raymond Arsenault captures the struggle for racial equality in pre-WWII America and a moment that inspired blacks and whites alike. In rising to the occasion, he writes, Marion Anderson "consecrated" the Lincoln Memorial as a shrine of freedom. In the 1963 March on Washington Martin Luther King would follow, literally, in her footsteps.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jul 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781608191895

Raymond Arsenault

Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. One of the nation’s leading civil rights historians, he is the author of several acclaimed and prize-winning books, including Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice and The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America.

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The Sound of Freedom

The Sound of Freedom

MARIAN ANDERSON, THE LINCOLN

MEMORIAL, AND THE CONCERT THAT

AWAKENED AMERICA

Raymond Arsenault

In memory of my father

Oscar Wilfred Arsenault

(1921–2007)

Contents

PROLOGUE October 1964

CHAPTER 1 Freedom’s Child

CHAPTER 2 Singing in the Dark

CHAPTER 3 Deep Rivers

CHAPTER 4 The Heart of a Nation

CHAPTER 5 Sweet Land of Liberty

EPILOGUE An American Icon, 1943-93

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

A Note on the Author

By the Same Author

PROLOGUE

October 1964

The date was October 24, 1964. President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the wily Texan who had overseen the recent passage of a landmark civil rights act, was in the White House. With the president’s declaration that the United States would soon overcome the seemingly intractable problems of racism and poverty, an ideal that he would later characterize as the Great Society, there was an air of expectation in Washington. But on that night there was also a reminder of how far the nation had come since the Great Depression of the 1930s, when Johnson had first entered the Political arena. Five hundred yards southwest of the White House, a large auditorium known as Constitution Hall was jammed with concertgoers, and on the stage a solitary figure held forth.

The woman standing in the spotlight, dressed in a floor-length satin gown, was the world-famous contralto Marian Anderson. The occasion was the opening concert of her long-awaited farewell tour. At the age of sixty-seven, after a half century of almost constant touring, Anderson had announced her retirement from the concert stage. The people seated in the front rows could see that she was no longer young, that her brown face was lined with wrinkles, her hair tinged with strands of gray. Her voice, though still beautiful, was no longer what it once was. Nearly sixty years of singing had taken their toll, and at the upper and lower ends of her three-octave range she now strained to deliver the perfect note. Yet no one seemed to care. Just seeing and hearing her perform onstage one more time was enough to send chills down the spine of almost everyone in the hall. ¹

No one in the audience had to be told who she was or that this was a special occasion, a moment of sweet irony. They had come to bear witness to the perseverance of a living legend. Year after year, polls had revealed that Marian Anderson was one of the most admired women in the world. Respected and beloved, she had no rival among black women as an icon of racial pride and accomplishment. Part of her mystique was a magical voice, an assortment of sounds so haunting and ethereal that more than one maestro had judged her to be the greatest singer of the twentieth century. But Anderson was more than a superbly gifted artist. She was also a symbol of resolute courage and human dignity. ²

Twenty-five years earlier, the proprietors of Constitution Hall—the Daughters of the American Revolution—had banned her from the hall, not because of anything she had done, but simply because she was black. Thousands of Americans rushed to her defense, pleading with the Daughters to relax the hall’s white artists only policy, but to no avail. When no other auditorium large enough to accommodate her many fans could be found, she had no choice but to sing in the open air. The concert, held at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday 1939, attracted no fewer than seventy-five thousand people. Black and white, they came to hear the sound of freedom, and she did not disappoint them. Broadcast over a national radio network and memorialized in newsreels, her bravura performance represented an iconic moment in the history of American democracy. The Lincoln Memorial would be the scene of other such moments—most notably in August 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his I Have a Dream speech at the March on Washington—but Anderson’s 1939 recital was the first time that the modern civil rights struggle invoked the symbol of the Great Emancipator in a direct and compelling way.

As she stood on the stage of Constitution Hall twenty-five years later, Anderson represented a triumph of the human spirit. Yet one suspects that few members of the audience appreciated how difficult it had been for her to assume the mantle of leadership in a cause that transcended music. Originating in the impoverished black community of South Philadelphia, her story is one of struggle against self-doubt, racial prejudice, and numerous other obstacles that would have vanquished a person of lesser resolve. During the 1930s, as the rising force of fascism promoted rank bigotry and racial oppression, her unprecedented conquest of the music world stood as a testament to the illegitimacy of racial prejudice. But this was only the beginning of a career that ultimately broke all barriers large and small, from the color bar at Constitution Hall to the all-white casting tradition at the famed Metropolitan Opera. How this modest, unassuming woman, born into poverty and burdened with the social stigma of a dark skin, became one of the most extraordinary and influential figures of the twentieth century is the subject of this book.

CHAPTER 1

Freedom’s Child

. . . we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain–that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom–and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

–ABRAHAM LINCOLN¹

Marian Anderson was born in the shadow of freedom. Less than a mile from her birthplace on Webster Street in South Philadelphia stood two enduring icons of American democracy: the Liberty Bell, a cracked but enduring piece of bronze that symbolized the resiliency of an emerging nation; and Independence Hall, the redbrick building where delegates to the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, and where eleven years later the Founding Fathers crafted the Constitution itself. Nearby two other historic sites testified both to the promise and the unrealized ideal of racial justice. At the junction of Sixth Street and Lombard, a sign marked the spot where, in 1787, the Reverend Richard Allen had founded the Free African Society, which later evolved into the African Methodist Episcopal Church; and a few blocks away, black Philadelphians could still visit the meeting hall where Quakers had formed America’s first antislavery society in 1775. In 1847, seven decades after the society’s founding, Pennsylvania achieved the total abolition of slavery, and with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 the rest of the nation followed suit. Yet at the time of Anderson’s birth, on February 27, 1897, the transition from slavery to freedom was unfinished business. In Philadelphia, as in other communities across the nation, Americans were still trying to define the meaning of democracy in a multiracial society. ²

The Civil War generation initiated the process of emancipation in 1862, but thirty-five years later Americans were still grappling with the implications of granting citizenship to millions of former slaves. The civil rights acts and constitutional amendments of the Reconstruction era had promoted a model of full participation in American life. But during the last quarter of the nineteenth century the U.S. Supreme Court issued a series of decisions that relegated African Americans to second-class citizenship. Beginning with the Slaughterhouse case of 1873, which all but nullified the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; and continuing through the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, which gutted the Civil Rights Act of 1876; and Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision that established the separate but equal doctrine, the Court encouraged and validated a national culture of racial discrimination.

The heightened racism of the post–Reconstruction era was most obvious in the South, where a de jure system of codified segregation known as Jim Crow was in full force by the first decade of the twentieth century. But Northern blacks living in places such as Philadelphia also experienced increased segregation and discrimination and a general lowering of expectations during these years. In the mid-1880s, in the wake of the Civil Rights Cases, state legislatures in thirteen Northern states, including Pennsylvania, passed laws that afforded blacks a measure of protection against the worst excesses of white supremacist institutions. But as Marian Anderson entered the world in 1897, a mere seven months after the Plessy decision, legislative protection did little to alter the harsh realities of black life in the City of Brotherly Love. ³

Anderson’s parents and paternal grandparents were recent migrants to Philadelphia. All four of her grandparents had been born into slavery in Virginia. Benjamin Anderson, her paternal grandfather, was born and raised on a plantation in King William County, in the lowlands of the Virginia tidewater. His wife, Mary Holmes Anderson, whom he married in 1869, was a native of nearby King and Queen County. During the first two decades of their marriage, the Andersons lived and worked on a small, hardscrabble farm in King William, bearing eight children. Five children—four sons and a daughter—survived into adulthood. The oldest son, John Berkley Anderson, born in 1875, would become Marian’s father.

Benjamin and Mary (also known as Isabella) Anderson moved to Philadelphia sometime in the early 1890s, settling into a large, ramshackle house on Fitzwater Street. The surrounding neighborhood, part of South Philadelphia’s Thirtieth Ward, was both predominantly black and ethnically diverse. There, among a tumultuous mix of inner-city African, Italian, Irish, and Jewish Americans, John Anderson courted and married Anna Delilah Rucker in 1895. A schoolteacher in the Appalachian hill town of Lynchburg, Virginia, Anna Rucker met John in Philadelphia while visiting her older sister, Alice Ward. Grant Ward, Alice’s husband, introduced the couple, who decided to marry after a whirlwind courtship, despite denominational differences. John was a devout Baptist who neither drank, smoked nor chewed, and Anna was a lifelong Methodist. Anna’s parents, Robert and Ellen Rucker, were both natives of Boonsboro, a small town nestled in the foothills of Bedford County just west of Lynchburg.

During Anna’s childhood, her father was an up-and-coming businessman who eventually became the co-owner of a livery stable in downtown Lynchburg. A leading figure in the local black community, he could often be seen transporting passengers to and from the train depot. Although the family achieved only a modicum of financial success, all four of the Rucker children harbored strong ambitions and respect for education, including Anna, who attended the all-black Virginia Seminary and College. While she did not remain long enough to acquire full teaching credentials, under Virginia law Annie was certified to teach in the state’s black schools. This was not the case, however, in Philadelphia, which required full credentials for all teachers. ⁴

Had Anna Anderson been allowed to teach in Philadelphia, Marian’s childhood and the family’s circumstances might have been substantially different. But, as it was, her mother had little choice but to find employment wherever she could. Prior to Marian’s birth, she provided day care for a number of small children, but she eventually supplemented her husband’s income by taking in laundry, working in a tobacco factory, and scrubbing floors at Wanamaker’s department store. John Anderson was, by all accounts, a hard worker, but like most black men of his day he had little formal education. One of the few steady jobs open to a black man with his limited skills was as a laborer at the Reading Railroad Terminal in central Philadelphia. Working long hours for low pay, he shoveled coal, sold ice, and performed a variety of odd jobs, some of which were dangerous. While he also moonlighted as a small-time liquor dealer, his total income did not amount to much.

During the first four years of their marriage, the Andersons lived in a tiny rented room on Webster Street, but when Anna became pregnant for a second time they were forced to move in with John’s parents. Both of Marian’s younger sisters were born in her grandparents’ house—Alyse in 1900 and Ethel May in 1902. Only after the addition of Ethel May did the family of five find the resources to rent a house of their own on Colorado Street, just a few blocks from Benjamin and Isabella Anderson’s residence. It was a small house, Marian recalled years later, but big enough for our purposes. The living room contained a minimum of furniture. Behind it was a little dining room, and behind that a shed kitchen . . . This house did not have a real bathroom, but Mother was undaunted. We were lathered and rinsed at least once a day, and on Saturday a huge wooden tub was set in the center of the kitchen floor. After sufficiently warm water was poured in, we were lifted inside. Mother would kneel and give us a good scrubbing with Ivory soap. Then we were put to bed.

The modest amenities of the Colorado Street house were hardly shocking when judged by the standards of the rural South. Indeed, many black families in the Deep South, or for that matter many families in Philadelphia, would have leaped at the opportunity to live in a two-story house with three bedrooms and an indoor kitchen. It was also clear, however, that the Andersons’ standard of living fell far short of middle-class respectability, and that their prospects of moving up into the middle class were dim. As long as John and Annie Anderson remained healthy enough—or lucky enough—to earn a steady income, they could maintain a measure of working-class solvency. But, like most black Philadelphians, they lived in a racially circumscribed world that fostered more insecurity than opportunity. ⁵

The absence of upward mobility and the inability to achieve long-term security are among the central themes of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Published in 1899, two years after Marian Anderson’s birth, Du Bois’s classic survey of black life in a Northern city provides a detailed and revealing profile of black Philadelphians at the end of the nineteenth century. With nearly sixty thousand inhabitants, Philadelphia’s black community was the fourth largest in the nation in the late 1890s. Only New Orleans, Washington, and Baltimore harbored a larger number of blacks. In its entirety, black Philadelphia represented an unmanageable subject for a lone researcher, even for one as talented as Du Bois, a highly trained sociologist and the first African American to earn a Ph.D. at Harvard. Accordingly, he decided to draw most of his conclusions from a case study of a single ward. For more than a year, from September 1896 to January 1898, he lived in the Seventh Ward in the midst of dirt, drunkenness, poverty and crime, as he later put it. The Andersons lived a few hundred yards to the south, just beyond the border separating the Seventh and Thirtieth Wards, but Du Bois’s findings would probably not have been appreciably different had he concentrated on the neighborhoods surrounding Webster Street. ⁶

After conducting a house-to-house canvass and distributing numerous questionnaires, Du Bois concluded that the black inhabitants of the Seventh Ward lived in a tangle of pathology, though not necessarily one of their own making. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the day, the primary barriers to racial progress were environmental and not hereditary. The root of the race problem, he determined, was an almost unbroken pattern of racial prejudice that stifled educational and occupational opportunities, driving black Philadelphians into listless despair. More often than not, the avenues of upward mobility were closed to black workers, including those with college degrees. As a case in point, he related the story of a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania in mechanical engineering . . . Well recommended, the young man obtained work in the city, through an advertisement, on account of his excellent record. He worked a few hours and then was discharged because he was found to be colored. He is now a waiter at the University Club, where his white fellow graduates dine. ⁷

Du Bois did not identify racism as the sole cause of social and economic inertia among black Philadelphians. He also had strong words for those in the black community who failed to display a sense of personal responsibility, who were either unwilling or unable to help themselves. Yet he kept coming back to the harsh realities of life imposed by a white supremacist culture that missed few opportunities to denigrate and marginalize a despised racial minority. No matter how well trained a Negro may be, or how fitted for work of any kind, Du Bois concluded, he cannot in the ordinary course of competition hope to be much more than a menial servant. While he conceded that many blacks were in dire need of uplift, subjecting them to the crippling effects of white contempt benefited no one. Without doubt social differences are facts not fancies and cannot lightly be swept aside, he declared, but they hardly need to be looked upon as excuses for downright meanness and incivility. ⁸

Du Bois documented the impact of racism on all elements of the black community, but he expressed special concern for the natural leaders of the race, the group he later identified as the Talented Tenth. In his view, the key to black progress was the unshackling of the most talented and industrious members of the race. Above all, the better classes of the Negroes should recognize their duty toward the masses, he insisted. They should not forget that the spirit of the twentieth century is to be the turning of the high toward the lowly, the bending of Humanity to all that is human; the recognition that in the slums of modern society lie the answers to most of our puzzling problems of organization and life, that only as we solve those problems is our culture assured and our progress certain. ⁹

Du Bois looked to the Talented Tenth for long-term solutions to the race problem. But he also turned to the black church as the only functioning institution capable of mitigating at least some of the social pathology burdening black Philadelphians. The Negro church has become a centre of social intercourse to a degree unknown in white churches . . . , he reported, adding a historical and contemporary note: The Negro churches were the birthplaces of Negro schools and of all agencies which seek to promote the intelligence of the masses; and even today no agency serves to disseminate news or information so quickly and effectively among Negroes as the church . . . Night schools and kindergartens are still held in connection with churches, and all Negro celebrities, from a bishop to a poet like Dunbar, are introduced to Negro audiences from the pulpit. Consequently all movements for social betterment are apt to centre in the churches. Beneficial societies in endless number are formed here . . . the minister often acts as an employment agent; considerable charitable and relief work is done . . . The race problem in all its phases is continually being discussed, and, indeed, from this forum many a youth goes forth inspired to work. Such are some of the functions of the Negro church, and a study of them indicates how largely this organization has come to be an expression of the organized life of Negroes in a great city.¹⁰

When Du Bois wrote these words, he had no knowledge of the extended Anderson clan living just south of the Seventh Ward. Yet it is difficult to imagine a more apt example of a church-centered black family. From grandparents to parents to children of all ages, their lives were wrapped around the religious and social activities of three distinctively different black churches. Marian’s grandfather, Benjamin Anderson, was a religious dissenter who called himself a Black Jew. His church, a storefront on Rosewood Street, was the creation of a charismatic preacher named William Saunders Crowdy. Drawing upon Old Testament themes, especially the Jewish Exodus from Egypt, Crowdy attracted a small but enthusiastic congregation of Israelites who celebrated the Sabbath on Saturday. Observing Passover and other Jewish holidays, they donned traditional Jewish garb, skullcaps for the men and long white gowns with head scarfs for the women. Benjamin’s attachment to Crowdy drew considerable criticism from the rest of the family, with the exception of Marian, who was unusually close to her soft-spoken and gentle grandfather. Marian’s mother and grandmother attended the Bainbridge Street Methodist Church, later renamed the Tindley Temple. Well-known for its talented choir, the church became one of Philadelphia’s largest congregations after the arrival of Charles Albert Tindley in 1902. A Maryland-born minister and composer, Tindley was one of the founders of the modern gospel-music tradition. In 1903, he wrote the words and music to I Shall Overcome, the hymn that was later transformed into the 1960s freedom song We Shall Overcome. ¹¹

The rest of the Andersons, including Marian, were faithful members of Union Baptist Church. Founded in 1832, Union Baptist, with more than a thousand members, was one of the largest and most influential black churches in the city at the turn of the century. Only Bethel AME had a larger congregation, and no church in the city boasted a more celebrated music program. Although John Anderson played no role in the musical life of the church, he was a church officer who often acted as an usher during Sunday services. His sister Mary, blessed with a beautiful voice, was a stalwart member of the choir, and she, more than anyone else, nurtured her young niece’s talent. ¹²

From an early age, Marian displayed an affinity for music. Before she turned two, she was already singing made-up songs while banging on a toy piano, and by the age of four everyone in the family recognized that she had a gift for singing. In 1903, just after her sixth birthday, she joined Union Baptist’s junior choir, and later in the year her aunt Mary bought her a cheap violin, which she played until the strings broke. But with no money for lessons, her interest waned. Several years later she resumed her rudimentary instrumental training after her father purchased a piano from his brother Walter. But once again she was hampered by a lack of formal instruction. Almost by default, she began to concentrate on her singing.

Alexander Robinson, the director of Union Baptist’s junior choir, was, as Anderson’s biographer has noted, the first professional musician to recognize her extraordinary voice, with its well-developed lower range that extended upward nearly three octaves, unusual in a young child. Anderson herself later credited Robinson with stimulating her love of singing. It gave him pleasure to work with those young voices, she recalled, and since he loved music and understood enough to communicate his feeling to us, he was able to do something with us. It was not long before the group was singing so well that it was invited to appear before the older children’s Sunday school, which convened in the afternoon. The group was good, but Marian’s voice was the main attraction. Before long she was singing duets and solos in the choir and filling the alto role in an all-girl quartet. On occasion she also sang duets with her aunt Mary, who began taking her to nearby churches, sometimes to sing and sometimes just to listen to some of the beautiful choral voices that could be heard all over Philadelphia. ¹³

Over time these visits became a source of income for the struggling Anderson family. At first Marian sang for a quarter or two, often at YMCA, YWCA, or charity gatherings. But, by the time she was eight, it was not unusual for her to bring home several dollars after making the rounds on a Sunday afternoon or Evening. Despite her young age, there is no indication that she felt exploited in any way. Indeed, in her autobiography, she describes the joy of encountering a makeshift handbill advertising one of her appearances: One day when I was on my way to the grocery to buy something for my mother, my eyes caught sight of a small handbill lying across the street. Even from a distance it looked vaguely familiar. I picked it up, and there in the corner was my picture with my name under it. ‘Come and hear the baby contralto, ten years old,’ it said. I was actually eight. What excitement! Clutching the paper in my hand, I hurried to the grocer’s. When I got home I discovered that I had bought potatoes instead of the bread Mother had sent me for. Before I could explain what possessed me, Mother turned me around and hurried me back to the store. I trotted away again, still holding fast to the handbill that proclaimed my fame. I have a far more vivid memory of the handbill than of the actual singing at the concert. ¹⁴

By the time she was ten, the baby contralto was beginning to attract attention from some of black Philadelphia’s most prominent choral directors. Emma Azalia Hackley, a locally renowned singer and voice teacher, was not only the director of the choir at the Church of the Crucifixion but also the founding director of the People’s Chorus, a choir of one hundred voices recruited from black churches across the city. Organized in 1904, the People’s Chorus included many of the city’s finest singers, so it was no small honor for Marian Anderson to be selected as the youn gest member of Hackley’s all-star choir. Despite her age, she was soon singing solos, as audiences marveled at hearing such a big voice pouring out of such a small body. Realizing that people sitting far from the stage might have trouble seeing her young prodigy, Hackley proudly placed Anderson on an elevated riser so that no one in the back of the hall would have the slightest difficulty in seeing her. ¹⁵

Anderson’s musical accomplishments gave her a special status among her peers and a range of experience well beyond the normal expectations for a young black girl growing up amid the poverty of the Eighth Ward. The People’s Chorus, in particular, took her to other parts of the city, including some predominantly white neighborhoods. Contact with whites was not entirely foreign to her even before she joined the People’s Chorus. White families dotted the Thirtieth Ward, and a handful even lived on Colorado Street. Moreover, from 1906 on Anderson attended an integrated school, the Stanton Grammar School, where roughly half of the students and all of the teachers were white. Yet seeing a bit of the white city outside her neighborhood was somehow different. Although the young singer continued to live in a black-majority community, she caught an early and tantalizing glimpse of a wider world.

Anderson’s childhood was marked by poverty and material deprivation. But in most senses she was not an impoverished child. As a member of a close and loving family, with strong ties to Union Baptist, she enjoyed the benefits of emotional, cultural, and spiritual security. Life with Mother and Father, while he lived, was a thing of great joy, she recalled years later, adding, It is easy to look back self-indulgently, feeling pleasantly sorry for oneself and saying I didn’t have this and I didn’t have that. But that is only the grown woman regretting the hardships of a little girl who never thought they were hardships at all. Certainly there were a lot of things she did not have, but she never missed them, because she didn’t really need them. She had the things that really mattered. ¹⁶

As she entered adolescence, Anderson was, by all accounts, a happy, well-adjusted child. But, unfortunately, the coming years would not be so kind to her and her family. Like many working-class families, the Andersons lived on the margins of subsistence, leaving them vulnerable to downward mobility and real hardship. One major setback could plunge them into an economic and social free fall. In the Andersons’ case, the setback occurred in early December 1909, when John Anderson suffered a serious accident at the Reading Terminal. Struck on the head by a heavy object, he lay in bed for nearly a month before succumbing to heart failure. His unexpected death at the age of thirty-four traumatized the family. Approaching her thirteenth birthday, Marian was old enough to understand the probable consequences of losing her father. But neither she nor her younger sisters had much time to adjust to the family’s altered circumstances. A few hours after the funeral, in the middle of the night, the grieving family moved out of the rented house on Colorado Street and into a spare room in the Fitzwater Street house occupied by Benjamin and Isabella Anderson. Marian’s grandparents were already providing shelter for two grown children and two small grandchildren, plus a couple of boarders. So the addition of four new residents created less than ideal living conditions for an extended family that had little but love to share. Marian’s mother had considered returning to her family’s home in Virginia, but her late husband’s parents insisted that she bring the girls to live in their home.

Life on Fitzwater Street—and later on Christian Street, where the Andersons moved into a large house in 1910—proved difficult for all concerned. Isabella Anderson was a strong-willed, sometimes overbearing woman who ruled with an iron hand. Her soft-spoken husband tried to counter her stern presence, but he could do little to protect his daughter-in-law and granddaughters from Isabella’s dictatorial ways. Marian and her sisters gravitated toward their gentle and sympathetic grandfather during the year following their father’s death, but they suffered a second shock when Benjamin Anderson died in late 1910. Thereafter, Marian’s mother found it increasingly difficult to raise her daughters without interference from her mother-in-law, who appeared to look down on Anna. The older woman was lighter skinned and never missed an opportunity to remind people that she was part Indian. The most significant point of conflict occurred during the summer of 1912 when Marian graduated from the Stanton School. Anna Anderson made plans for her daughter to attend high school in the fall, but was overruled by a mother-in-law who had come to depend on the supplemental income derived from her granddaughter’s singing and domestic work. Since Marian’s two cousins, one of whom was seventeen, were working full-time and contributing to the household income, it seemed reasonable to ask Marian to do the same.

Marian herself had mixed feelings about dropping out of school. She had never been a conscientious student, and the music program at Stanton, though modest, had always been her favorite school activity. While she was disappointed that she would not be able to participate in the normal round of high school social events, choosing work over school allowed her to concentrate on her music. Despite the obvious tensions in the house hold, she also felt a deep responsibility toward her family and was eager to contribute her fair share of income. Delivering laundry part of the day was a small sacrifice to pay for the opportunity to sing whenever and wherever she could find an engagement. ¹⁷ engagement.

Sometimes she sang with her sisters, both of whom also had rich and lustrous voices, but most of the time she sang solo. After joining the senior choir at Union Baptist in 1910, she became a featured performer and the pride of the church. Poised beyond her years, with a growing confidence and sophistication, she began to think about a professional career. Wherever she went, she received plaudits and encouragement, though not enough money to pay for voice lessons or enrollment in high school. At one point, Union Baptist’s pastor, the Reverend Wesley Parks, interrupted a service to take up a special collection for the church’s favorite singer, but the money collected was too meager to underwrite Anderson’s education. Fortunately, Parks found a more profound and lasting way of influencing Anderson’s career. As a young man, he had befriended the mother of Roland Hayes, the greatest black tenor of the day. Parks later became a great admirer of Hayes’s music and in 1911 established a tradition of inviting Hayes to headline Union Baptist’s annual gala concert. Hayes returned year after year, and his appearance was the highlight of the Philadelphia concert season, though not everyone approved of his choice of songs. Mr. Hayes sang old Italian airs, German lieder, and French songs exquisitely, Anderson recalled. "Even people with little understanding of music knew it was beautiful singing and they were proud that Mr. Hayes was one of their own and world-famous. But after a time a few grumbled that they did not understand what he was singing. And there were some who said, ‘If our Marian were on the program, we would understand what she was singing about.’ So eventually I was permitted to appear on his program and sing two or three numbers." ¹⁸

Meeting Roland Hayes changed Marian Anderson’s life. From the first time that she heard him sing in 1911 until his death in 1977, he served as her primary role model and mentor. Born in Curryville, Georgia, in 1887, Hayes moved to Tennessee at the age of eleven and later attended Fisk University, where he sang with the Jubilee Singers. When Anderson first met him, he was only twenty-four. But he was already a rising star among black concert artists. One of the few singers of his day to attempt a mix of European folk songs and traditional Negro music, he established a musical style that Anderson embraced as her own. She was also drawn to his quiet dignity and seriousness of purpose. He was a professional’s professional, and she sought to emulate his dedication to the only real freedom, the freedom to produce and to create, as Hayes’s close friend and biographer MacKinley Helm once characterized his philosophy.¹⁹

The bond between them was based on mutual respect, and Hayes took an immediate interest in Union Baptist’s golden-voiced contralto. He, along with others who recognized her promise, urged her to study with a professional voice teacher, preferably a white teacher who could help launch her career. In March 1914, she participated in a People’s Chorus concert that drew favorable attention from the music critic of the Philadelphia Tribune, a local black newspaper. Noting Anderson’s singularly rare contralto voice, the critic provided her with enough encouragement to prompt a series of inquiries about studying with a professional teacher. Most of the city’s white voice teachers held classes in the Presser Building, on Chestnut Street, but none of the Presser teachers that she approached was willing to accept her as a student. Whether because of racism or the suspicion that she did not have the necessary funds to pay for a teacher’s services, they turned her away. ²⁰

Later in the year, with the help of the Union Baptist congregation, she tried again. After several members of the church assured her that they would pay her tuition, Anderson steeled her courage and walked a dozen city blocks to the Philadelphia Music Academy on Spruce Street. Hoping to complete an application, she instead received a bitter lesson in the realities of racial prejudice. I went there one day at a time when enrollments were beginning, and I took my place in line, she recounted. "There was a young girl behind a cage who answered questions and gave out application blanks to be filled out. When my turn came she looked past me and called on the person standing behind me. This went on until there was no one else in line. Then she spoke to me, and her voice was not friendly. ‘What do you want?’ I tried to ignore her manner and replied that I had come to make inquiries regarding an application for entry to the school. She looked at me coldly and said, ‘We don’t take colored.’ I don’t think I said a word. I just looked at this girl and was shocked that such words could come from one so young . . . I did not argue with her or ask to see her superior. It was as if a cold, horrifying hand had been laid on me. I turned and walked out."

Anderson later remembered this incident as one of the formative experiences of her life. As she told a Ladies’ Home Journal reporter in 1960, the rejection provided a painful realization of what it meant to be a Negro. In the short term, it forestalled all thought of studying with a white voice teacher. I tried to put the thought of a music school out of my mind, she remembered, for I could not help thinking of other music schools and wondering whether this would be their attitude too. I would not risk rejection again, and for some years the idea was not mentioned.

Anderson puzzled over why this episode was so dispiriting. reflecting upon her early years, she conceded that she was no stranger to subtle forms of racial prejudice, even

Reviews for The Sound of Freedom

[atiara_7 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting and well-written but I think some of the detail of her early career and some of the background information on black performers who preceded her could have been cut. I did learn a lot. It's a fascinating story which says a lot about America and I would recommend it to foreigners trying to understand the US. One problem is I did not get a sense of Marian Anderson as a person, which the author admits as a problem.