Legendary Contralto Marian Anderson's New York Roots

Eighty years ago, the legendary contralto Marian Anderson performed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The April 9, 1939, concert was an iconic moment: Anderson, a black woman, had been invited to sing there by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt after the Daughters of the American Revolution barred her from performing at Constitution Hall. That day, she sang in front of the statue of the Great Emancipator for an integrated audience of 75,000—a far larger crowd than could have fit into DAR's venue.

Lesser known is how, by that point in her career, she had already been playing in front of integrated audiences for years. Fifteen years earlier, in April 1924, Anderson took the stage at Town Hall in Manhattan's Midtown for one of her first major concerts outside of her native Philadelphia. At the time, it was one of the few large venues she could perform in as a black woman.

But while she was welcome at the concert hall, she still wasn't well known. Only a few people attended, and she was so disheartened by the mixed reviews her performance garnered that she considered giving up singing entirely.

"She just didn't get the reception that she wanted," said Town Hall Foundation President Tom Wirtshafter, "and I certainly know that she couldn't get other work, that other halls had not opened up to her."

Luckily, Anderson's manager convinced her to keep at it. Soon afterwards, she found success singing in concert halls across Europe, where she no longer had to battle segregation and Jim Crow laws. When she returned to the United States—and to New York—she was an international star. She played Town Hall again in 1935 and brought down the house, cementing her stardom in the U.S.

In the following years, more and more venues opened up to her. In the two decades between 1940 and 1960, Anderson performed nine times at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, according to BAM Archives Director Sharon Lehner.

At the height of her career, the famed conductor Arturo Toscanini famously said a voice like Anderson's only comes around once a century. And in 1955, she knocked down another wall as the first black woman to sing at the Metropolitan Opera. Marian Anderson died in 1993.