Marian Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial concert wasn’t the moment of racial reconciliation we like to think

Marian Anderson singing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939.
(Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

By: Philip Kennicott

Art and architecture critic

August 26, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

With one little click, suddenly I was down the memory hole.

I had been writing about the symbolic use and abuse of the Lincoln Memorial, about its basic message of reconciliation and how some politicians have co-opted it for their own, divisive agenda. I mentioned, in passing, Marian Anderson, whose 1939 open-air concert at the memorial helped launch the modern civil rights movement. And it suddenly occurred to me that it had been a long time, way too long, since I had revisited Anderson’s performance.

While watching her sing “My Country ’Tis of Thee” on YouTube, something snapped in me. The slight tremolo in the voice, so confident, so perfectly pitched, seemed to represent all the hope and squandered promise of that moment. After the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her to use Constitution Hall because she was Black (and the city’s Board of Education also denied her access to the auditorium of one of its Whites-only schools), first lady Eleanor Roosevelt engineered the idea of a concert at the Lincoln Memorial.

The pressure on Anderson as she sang in front of a crowd of 75,000 and a radio audience of millions is unfathomable. And she nailed it, not just singing beautifully, but with a voice that seemed to enfold within it a desperate craving for a better world. It was a voice that pulsed with utopian hopes and touched hearts, not unlike the way that the short speech given by…

Marian Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial concert wasn’t the moment of racial reconciliation we like to think

Recent Posts

Categories

the franklin delano roosevelt foundation