Abstract
Marian Anderson, an African-American contralto of international acclaim, sang to 75,000 people on Easter Sunday, 9 April 1939, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Her concert was the culmination of a controversy about race conducted through institutional channels and the public platform of the press. The controversy began with the refusal of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) to let Anderson perform in Constitution Hall. The DAR operated under a policy which banned African Americans and other non-whites from renting their facility. After being turned down by the DAR, Howard University, the sponsor of the concert, attempted to reserve the Central High School auditorium, a white high school situated in Washington DCs segregated school district. Central and the school district representatives denied Howard — a predominantly African-American institution — use of the facility. After First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned in protest from the DAR, a nationwide controversy ensued regarding racial discrimination.
I can’t decide whether the refusal [by the Daughters of the American Revolution] was in the nature of a protest to Marian Anderson for daring to use the voice which God gave her, or whether it was a reprimand to the Almighty for presuming to give one of the greatest voices of our age to a non-Caucasian. The whole incident is too stupid to be funny. It’s a tragic manifestation of something or other and it has the earmarks of racial decadence.1
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Notes
S. Hall, ‘Encoding, Decoding’, The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. S. During (London: Routledge, 1993) p. 91.
M. Omi and H. Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 1986) p. 1–86.
For accounts of the 1930s African-American experience see J. H. Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 3rd edn (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967);
J. Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985);
H. Sitkoff, ed., Fifty Years Later: The New Deal Evaluated (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1985);
H. Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978);
N. J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).
L. Levine, The Unpredictable Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) p. 214;
W. Susman, Culture as History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984) pp. 197–8.
W. Susman, Culture as History, p. 153, citing R. S. Lynd, Knowledge for What? The Place of the Social Sciences in American Culture (Princeton, NJ, 1967) pp. 16, 19.
This attempt to reconcile the maltreatment and low societal position of African Americans with the ‘American Way’ is addressed in Gunnar Myrdal’s book The American Dilemma. He maintained that the American dilemma was the attempt to make the marginalized status of African Americans congruent with the ‘American Creed.’ The ‘American Creed’ embodied the ideals ‘of the essential dignity of the individual human being, of the fundamental equality of all men, and of certain inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and a fair opportunity’. G. Myrdal, R. Steiner, and A. Rose, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1962) p. 4.
B. Brawley, The Negro Genius: A New Appraisal of the Achievement of the American Negro in Literature and the Fine Arts (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1937) p. 9.
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Vriend, S.R. (2000). Music, Marginalization, and Racial Identities. In: Zuidervaart, L., Luttikhuizen, H.M. (eds) The Arts, Community and Cultural Democracy. Cross-Currents in Religion and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62374-7_4
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