Contralto Marian Anderson was born in Philadelphia on February 27, 1897. Marian was the eldest of the three Anderson children, and was educated in the public schools. Anderson's parents were both devout Christians and the whole family was active in the Union Baptist Church. Although Anderson had early showed an interest in the violin, she eventually focused on singing. She displayed a remarkable flair for singing when very young. Beginning as young as six, her aunt arranged for Marian to sing for local functions where she was often paid 25 or 50 cents for singing a few songs. At the age of 10, Marian joined the People's Chorus of Philadelphia where she was often featured a soloist. As she got into her early teens, Marian began to make as much as four or five dollars for singing.
Marian's father died following a heart failure. He was 37 years old. Marian and her family moved into the home of her father's parents, Benjamin and Isabella Anderson. Her grandfather had been born a slave and was emancipated in the 1860s. He relocated to South Philadelphia, the first person in his family to do so. Anderson attended Stanton Grammar School, graduating in 1912. Although her family could not pay for any music lessons or high school, Anderson continued to perform wherever she could and learn from anyone willing to teach her. Throughout her teenage years, she remained active in her church's musical activities and was now involved heavily in the adult choir. She became a member of the Baptists' Young People's Union and the Camp Fire Girls.
Anderson subsequently met the tenor Roland Hayes, who was widely considered the best African American singer of his time. From Hayes, she learned how to keep a quiet, dignified demeanor. He also advised her that she should aim for international success by singing a variety of musical styles, not just spirituals and folk songs. She toured regionally, gaining knowledge and confidence with each performance. In 1924, she entered a contest with 300 competitors and won first prize. It was a recital at Lewisohn Stadium in New York City with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. The concert revealed Anderson’s discomfort with foreign languages and almost caused her to end her vocal career. Boghetti convinced her to continue her studies, but when Anderson was unable to establish an active career in the United States, she went to London in 1925 to study. In 1928, she made her first performance at Carnegie Hall.
During her fall 1929 concert schedule, Anderson sang at Orchestra Hall in Chicago, for which she received measured praise. In the summer of 1930, she went to Scandinavia, where she met the Finnish pianist Kosti Vehanen, who became her regular accompanist and her vocal coach for many years. She also met Jean Sibelius through Vehanen after he had heard her in a concert in Helsinki. The two struck up an immediate friendship. During the next ten years, she performed extensively in Europe. She made a number of concert appearances in the United States, but racial prejudice prevented her career from gaining momentum. In 1933, Marian Anderson made her European debut in a concert at Wigmore Hall in London, where she was received enthusiastically. In the first years of the 1930s, she toured Europe, where she did not encounter the prejudices she had experienced in America.
During a 1935 tour in Salzburg Austria, it was an encore of Schubert’s “Ave Maria”, that led Arturo Toscanini, the famous Italian symphony conductor, to state “Yours is a voice one hears once in a hundred years.” Anderson returned to the United States in 1935 for a recital at Town Hall, which this time was a critical success. Her successes, however, did not exempt her from Jim Crow laws in the 1930s. Although she gave approximately seventy recitals a year in the United States, Anderson was still turned away by some American hotels and restaurants. In the midst of this discrimination, Albert Einstein, a champion of racial tolerance, hosted Anderson on many occasions, the first being in 1937 when she was denied a hotel room while performing at Princeton University. She was often refused accommodations at restaurants, hotels, and concert halls. The most highly publicized racial instance involving Anderson occurred in 1939.
American impresario Sol Hurok and officials from Howard University tried to arrange a concert for her in Constitution Hall, the largest and most appropriate indoor location in Washington, D.C. The hall’s owners, the Daughters of the American Revolution denied permission to Anderson for a concert on April 9 1939. They cited a white performers-only policy in effect at the time. In addition to the policy on performers, Washington, DC, was a segregated city, and Black patrons were upset that they would have to sit at the back of Constitution Hall. Other DC venues were not an option: for example, the District of Columbia Board of Education declined a request for the use of the auditorium of Central High School, a White public high school.
As the controversy grew, the American press overwhelmingly supported Anderson's right to sing. The Richmond Times-Dispatch wrote, "In these days of racial intolerance so crudely expressed in the Third Reich, an action such as the D.A.R.'s ban ... seems all the more deplorable. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR in protest. Roosevelt wrote to the DAR: "I am in complete disagreement with the attitude taken in refusing Constitution Hall to a great artist ... You had an opportunity to lead in an enlightened way and it seems to me that your organization has failed." At the suggestion of Walter White, the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Anderson's manager, Sol Hurok, persuaded Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes to arrange organized an open air concert for Anderson on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
The concert was performed on Easter Sunday, April 9. Anderson was accompanied, by Kosti Vehanen. They began the performance with a dignified and stirring rendition of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee". The Easter Sunday program drew a crowd of 75,000 people and millions of radio listeners. The entire episode caused the news media to focus greater attention on subsequent cases of discrimination involving Anderson and other African Americans. Anderson was given the NAACP’s Spingarn Award, presented to her by Eleanor Roosevelt, for distinguished achievement in 1939. Anderson was granted the Edward Bok Award by Philadelphia in 1941, for her distinguished services. She used the $10,000 she received as part of the Bok Award, to established the Marian Anderson Scholarships. It supported several up and coming musicians.
Anderson married her high school sweetheart, Orpheus Fisher, in July, 1943. They moved to a farm near Danbury, Connecticut. Fisher was White, and their interracial marriage provoked prejudice in their new community. Anderson continued to tour, singing recitals around the world. In 1943, she sang at the Constitution Hall, having been invited by the DAR, the same ones who banned her four years earlier, to perform before an integrated audience as part of a benefit for the American Red Cross. During World War II and the Korean War, Anderson entertained troops in hospitals and at bases. In 1950, Anderson and her husband sold their house and fifty acres of the farm and agreed to divide their time between a smaller house near Anderson’s studio and New York City.
In 1954, Metropolitan Opera general manager Rudolf Bing signed Anderson for the role of Ulrica in the Met’s production of Un Ballo in Maschera, by Giuseppe Verdi. Her debut on January 7, 1955, marked the first time that an African American had sung on the Met stage. Although she never appeared with the company again, Anderson was named a permanent member of the Metropolitan Opera company. Her autobiography, "My Lord, What a Morning", was published in 1957. In that same year, she sang for President Dwight D. Eisenhower's inauguration, and toured India and the Far East, traveling 35,000 miles in 12 weeks, giving 24 concerts, as a goodwill ambassador through the U.S. State Department. After that, President Eisenhower appointed her a delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Committee. The same year, she was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 1958, she was officially designated a delegate to the United Nations, a formalization of her role as "goodwill ambassadress" of the U.S. Marian Anderson's honors included a doctorate of music from Howard University and honorary degrees from more than 20 other American educational institutions. On January 20, 1961, she sang for President John F. Kennedy's inauguration, and in 1962 she performed for President Kennedy and other dignitaries in the East Room of the White House and toured Australia. On 28 August 1963, Anderson once again performed at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, this time singing the Negro spiritual, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” where Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. During that same year President Kennedy awarded Anderson the first Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Three years later, in 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed her to the National Council on the Arts. Marion Anderson continued to perform at every major concert hall in America. Anderson quietly supported many civil rights causes. She performed benefit concerts in aid of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, the NAACP, and the Congress of Racial Equality. Anderson retired in 1965 with a final concert, conducted by her nephew, James DePreist, in Philadelphia. Although Anderson retired, she continued to appear publicly. She talked to young people in colleges and conservatories, devoted time to arts organizations, traveled, worked on photography, tended to her husband after he suffered a stroke, sewed, and established an annual award for young American singers.
A true contralto, Anderson’s voice was large. She had the flexibility to be equally at home with Negro spirituals and operas. Anderson had the combination of talent, perseverance, dignity, and serenity at a time when there was finally just enough tolerance in this country to allow those traits to manifest themselves. Anderson performed with renowned orchestras in major concert and recital venues throughout the United States and Europe between 1925 and 1965. Marian Anderson was an important figure in the struggle for Black artists to overcome racial prejudice in the United States during the mid-twentieth century. This singer who had once been barred from performing in the nation's capital had now become one of the world's most beloved artist and musical icon.