Jo Reed: Arturo Toscanini called Marian Anderson the Voice of the Century but now most Americans know her for that iconic moment in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 singing to thousands of blacks and whites who came to honor her and stand against segregation. Marian Anderson’s road to the Lincoln Memorial is a momentous one and one that reveals the cracks in American democracy and shows the cruel face of Jim Crow. It’s the subject of Raymond Arsenault’s latest book, “The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert that Awakened America.” Ray Arsenault dropped by the studios and we talked about his book. Let’s listen. Jo Reed: I want to know what made you decide to write a book about Marian Anderson’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Ray Arsenault: A couple things. For one, I wanted to find some way to contribute to the Lincoln Bicentennial. I’ve never been a Lincoln scholar per se though I’ve often taught about Lincoln and I had a notion about doing something on Carl Sandburg’s “Lincoln” but I ultimately decided that it was Lincoln’s legacy. I also had this longstanding interest in events like the Marian Anderson concert, of cultural events that prepared the way for the political revolution that took place in the civil rights years, things like Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in major league baseball and Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics. And frankly I was stunned that not only has-- had there not been a book on the concert, which may not be all that surprising-- it’s only a half-hour concert and how many concerts get books devoted to them-- but not even an-- a-- an academic article. Historians had just missed it, not unlike the freedom rider story which I wrote my previous book on. And all of these graduate students out there looking for dissertation topics, and sometimes I think they pick ones that are not particularly broad gauged in their interest, and you would think someone would have done this. And so I was frankly shocked that I had found another major civil rights milestone in my view that we had missed and hadn’t really focused on, and so I threw myself into it and— Jo Reed: Ray, explain why that concert was a major milestone in the civil rights struggle. Ray Arsenault: It’s a milestone I think in large part because of where it took place and who the characters were. It’s Washington, D.C. It’s not Birmingham; it’s not Atlanta; it’s not Jackson, Mississippi. It’s the nation’s capital. It’s 1939. The United States is rediscovering the American creed because it wants to contrast itself with Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy as a rediscovery of American democracy, and of course this is in the midst of a cradle-to-grave Jim Crow segregation system so it wasn’t easy to appear to be or to convince yourself that you were Simon Pure on matters of democracy and inclusion. So the war is coming, totalitarianism is rising, and here you have Marian Anderson, one of the most famous singers in the world, a woman who-- of extraordinary dignity and grace who pulled herself out of the-- essentially the black ghetto of south Philadelphia and had graced the major stages of Europe and Latin America and Scandinavia and Russia. And she had sung before the crowned heads of Europe and she had sung in Washington many times but in smaller venues and by 1939 she’s world famous. There’s only one venue that’s appropriate; it’s Constitution Hall ‘cause Washington is the only city in the United States-- large city without a municipal auditorium. So you had to go to the-- to Constitution Hall owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution, perhaps the most famous patriotic organization in the United States, and they had a white artists only policy going back to 1931. Jo Reed: Going back to 1931? Ray Arsenault: Yes. Constitution Hall opened in 1929 to great fanfare and they actually had black performers in the first couple of years including Roland Hayes who was a great black tenor who was Marian Anderson’s mentor; he was her role model. He came out on stage in 1931 and he noticed that there were many fewer black patrons in the audience than he expected and they were all sitting in segregated seating and he refused to go on. He said, “I want you to mix them up.” He was really angry, but Fred Hand, who was a former actor and a militant white supremacist who ran Constitution Hall, basically stared him down and Roland Hayes did sing that day reluctantly but after that the DAR and Fred Hand declared a white artists only policy. Eight years later when the Howard University concert series desperately looking for a place for Marian Anderson to sing-- I mean she had been drawing five and six thousand people everywhere she sang including southern cities like Birmingham and Houston and here they are in the nation’s capital. She has an amazing following there and they knew that the Howard Chapel wouldn’t work or the auditorium of the black high schools and there were just-- there was nowhere else for her to sing. And so they really weren’t trying to break down segregation per se. I think they hoped of course that once Marian Anderson sang there that the barriers would come down but that really wasn’t the motivation; they just wanted a place for Marian Anderson to sing and they were asking for an exception but the DAR wouldn’t do it. They got their backs up, they felt that their autonomy was being infringed, and particularly when a Marian Anderson citizens’ committee formed and tried to pressure them into doing it they became more and more intransigent. And all of this led to Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady’s, resignation from the DAR and no First Lady had ever done anything quite like this before to sort of intrude into a major public controversy, and of course Eleanor was finding her way as a civil rights advocate and she was trying to push her husband farther and farther to the progressive side of things. And he was hemmed in of course by all these powerful committee chairmen from the South who were militant segregationists and I think maybe his heart was with Eleanor but his politics were elsewhere. And so Eleanor was trying to push the edge of the envelope and when she resigned it became an international controversy. And Walter White of the N double A CP, who was a good friend of Eleanor’s and of Marian Anderson’s, and Charles Hamilton Houston, the former Dean of Howard Law School, headed up this Marian Anderson citizens’ committee, which was one of the first interracial civil rights pressure groups ever created. I mean it’s amazing; it was over a concert. And they kept pushing to try to get the DAR to back down and very bad press coverage for the DAR. They were compared of course to the fascists of Germany and they were treated as rank hypocrites for talking about the glories of the American Revolution but they wouldn’t let Marian Anderson sing in their hall. Jo Reed: Called Constitution Hall. Ray Arsenault: Yeah, it’s Constitution Hall, exactly. And the controversy spread to the school system. Their plan B was for her to sing at Central High School, a large-- about-- I think it seated about 2000, it was a white high school, and the school board turned them down too. So here you are in the nation’s capital when America’s trying to show its democratic face to the world and here’s Marian Anderson, this lovely, extraordinarily talented woman who had-- not only had the image of having the greatest three-octave voice range in the world and Arturo Toscanini had anointed her as the Voice of the Century and she had amazing bearing and dignity and you would think would not threaten anyone. They wouldn’t let her sing, not only the DAR but also the school board, and so of course this led to a series of ideas of trying to find out where she could sing, and at first they thought maybe Lafayette Park across from the White House and then a couple people I think simultaneously came up with the idea what about the Lincoln Memorial. It had been around since 1922 but no large gathering had ever met there; the park service had never given permission. One church group I think had about 2000 people at one point but this was of course long before Dr. King gave his “I have a dream” speech and the march on Washington in 1963, before all of those kind of demonstrations. I mean today I think it’s the logical place to go if you want to make a point about democracy in American life but Marian Anderson’s concert was the first one. And it was kind of a coming together of her promoter, Sol Hurok, the great impresario-- he saw a great opportunity here-- and Walter White to-- of the N double A CP to make a point and Charles Hamilton Houston and Harold Ickes, the most liberal member of Roosevelt’s cabinet was the head of the Department of Interior and his assistant, Oscar Chapman; they all jumped on this. And a wonderful story: FDR was leaving for Easter-- it was supposed to happen on Easter Sunday-- about two weeks before he was leaving for Warm Springs and Ickes raced to the White House to get FDR before he jumped on the train to get his okay. And of course he-- FDR had been lobbied for so long by Eleanor about desegregation and about how great Marian Anderson was and Marian had a son at the White House in 1936 and had befriended both of them. So FDR says, “She can sing from the top of the Washington Monument if she wants to” and he hops on the train and of course they took him at his word. And the day of the concert it was rainy in the morning and cold and they weren’t sure who was going to show up. They had solicited a lot of politicians to be on the sponsoring committee and they did have Supreme Court justices and senators and cabinet people, but a lot of people that you might expect just shied away from it. I mean it was-- amazingly they considered it to be too controversial to put their name on a program so they didn’t know what was going to happen, and she’d never sung in the outdoors before. I mean for her it was all about the music and she was terrified that she was going to let people down and she almost backed out at the last minute and she’d never been in this kind of situation before and— Jo Reed: I would imagine the weather is not great for the voice. Ray Arsenault: Definitely. It’s April 9^th. Washington can be a pretty dreary place in early April. Well, she gets there and there are 75,000 people roughly half black and half white. They had troops of black Boy Scouts and white Boy Scouts passing out the programs, which had part of Gettysburg Address on it, and from the first time she opened her mouth-- and she said she really didn’t-- later said, “I don’t know how I even sang. I didn’t think anything would come out of my mouth” but she sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” of course the same song that Aretha Franklin sang at the Obama inauguration, and she changed the words slightly from “My country ‘tis of thee, of thee we sing” instead of “I sing” and that was like her, kind of a subtle little twist to make a statement. She never really explained it but people who were there never forgot it; it was a life-changing experience. They got a kind of vision of what America could be, a kind of a-- it was just a moment but it was kind of sense of the democratic promise of America in a nation which often did not live up to that promise. And I mean sadly that night after the concert, all the great feeling about it, but no hotel in Washington would let Marian Anderson and her mother stay because they were black; they had to stay that night in a private home. So it was a bittersweet experience on that day although she was mobbed at the end of the concert. People just wanted-- holding up their children, they wanted to touch her, to have her sing another encore, and they almost crushed her; they actually took her back into the monument under the statue of Lincoln by Daniel Chester French. And think about the irony of this: So many African Americans in American history have been mobbed by lynch mobs and here she’s being mobbed because of the affection and because people were touched by this concert, which was part Schubert and German lieder songs and part spirituals and patriotic songs. And again it was only a half hour long but Marian Anderson’s life and I think American history was never quite the same again. I mean she became almost overnight a-- an icon of freedom associated with Lincoln. Later in her life she-- the last 20 years of her performing she did Aaron Copland’s “The Lincoln Portrait,” when she did the speaking part of various Lincoln passages, and she was a reluctant activist I would say. I mean for her it was all about the music and she never felt comfortable sort of advancing herself into the spotlight other than with her voice, but she knew this role had been thrust upon her and she very graciously accepted it ultimately and created a kind of public life where she ultimately was a delegate to the United Nations and got involved in the early African independence. And she did tours with the State Department in Asia and spoke out during the Little Rock crisis and was the first artist to desegregate southern theaters in Miami and Jacksonville, kind of broke the back of the Jim Crow tradition for black performers in the South. And she lived for another 54 years after the concert, she didn’t die until 1993, and she of course in 1955 broke the color line at the Metropolitan Opera, which I think for many people is a staggering revelation that it was 16 years later before the Metropolitan Opera in New York City would allow a black person to sing. Jo Reed: And meanwhile she was singing in the great opera houses around Europe. Ray Arsenault: Well, she never actually sang opera. There was a notion that she might. She was really a concert singer. She sang German lieder, Schubert. She sang in four or five different languages but she never had an opera career. It’s interesting that opera was the most segregated part of the classical music world. In general, classical music was off limits to African Americans. She insisted of singing in-- again in European languages and singing classical European music and I think people didn’t know what to do with her; they didn’t where to sort of pigeonhole her. There are wonderful stories of southern music critics, one in particular in Houston, who after seeing her performance in Houston in the late ‘30s he wrote this amazing piece of criticism saying, “I’ve been covering the music scene for 35 years. I’ve never seen anything like this. First of all, I’ve never heard a voice like this but secondly to see the reaction of this crowd, both black and white, of going up and almost forgetting the Jim Crow system of sort of mingling together in front of the stage trying to get her to sing more of an encore, to talk to her, to connect with her.” And he couldn’t help, this particular critic, of sort of speculating about this cultural experience might be a way of getting beyond the kind of traditions of Jim Crow racism. And I think you can see that in many ways they-- some of these cultural figures like Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in major league baseball and Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics and Joe Lewis knocking out Max Schmeling in 1938 that those things in and of themselves perhaps can’t change the world but they pave the way for the heavy lifting on the political scene later, the timing of the civil rights movement, things like the Montgomery bus boycott and the sit-ins in 1960 and Birmingham in 1963 and the Civil Rights Act. All those things might have been very different if you hadn’t had the Marian Andersons and the Jackie Robinsons sort of paving the way or to-- maybe to mix a metaphor I mean there were kind of cracks in the mold of American racism. And it’s-- was sad for the DAR that they somehow didn’t get the message, <laughs> that everyone else knew how famous and how wonderful she was and they found themselves on the wrong side of history in 1939 and they’ve been paying for it ever since. They’ve tried to make amends in recent years and-- but it was a very embarrassing thing for them in part because of the-- their-- the pretense really of representing American democracy and yet giving this extraordinarily dramatic representation of the denial of democracy in the nation’s capital against Marian Anderson of all people. Jo Reed: I’m thinking, Ray, art that’s used for politics, propaganda like Soviet art typically not so good but the way pure art can just authentically open minds in a way that allows for a broader political engagement, you can’t predict it, you can’t make it happen, but it’s extraordinary when it does. Ray Arsenault: Yeah, and I think sometimes art, culture can get beyond our sensors, that the-- maybe our antennae are up to ward off things more specifically in the political realm but we sometimes react to music just sort of spontaneously, and I think that’s what people did with Marian Anderson. She didn’t fit any of the-- what-- of their expectations. She wore Parisian gowns and she was so well spoken and so obviously kind and compassionate and they didn’t know what to do with her, and I think in trying to figure out what to do with her it reorganized I think their notion of the way the world at least could operate. Jo Reed: Ray, I don’t mean for this to sound trite but the bottom line: What do you think came out of the Marian Anderson concert? Where did it leave us as a country? Ray Arsenault: Well, I think two things. One, it set a pattern for an interracial civil rights coalition, all the groups that came together to try to get her a place to sing in Washington; that really had never happened before. The one possible exception is the Scottsboro case of the ‘30s where you did have blacks and whites marching for the Scottsboro boys but this was so deliberative. It’s really a kind of preview of coming attractions for the civil rights movement and it’s very early now. This is eight years before Jackie Robinson breaks the color line in major league baseball for example and it’s fifteen years before the Brown decision so it’s very, very early, but I think more importantly it shows that there is this obvious gap between the theory of American democracy and the reality, that it was dramatic representation, which is going to happen again and again during the war. I mean in some ways it’s the first beginning of this ideological transformation in American life where racism loses its propriety. I think prior to World War II you could use racial epithets, you could talk, North or South, and be pretty sure that everyone would affirm your white supremacist kind of suppositions; that’s-- that was the way of the world. And once we go off to war and we’re fighting a kind of Nazi racism; by 1945 you have to hide it behind code words and it’s no longer respectable. Even the southern demagogues, even the Theodore Bilbos can’t be quite so open in expressing racism as the American way, and I think the Marian Anderson concert is one of those events that pushes the country towards this sort of newer sensibility. I mean by no means is it the promised land, there’s a lot of hard work to be done, but at least it puts the burden of proof on the white supremacists. It’s no longer the accepted mainstream of American life and I think it-- part of it has to do with her dignity, her whole kind of persona, her mystique. I mean by the ‘50s I mean she’s-- in every poll she is among the ten most admired women in the world; she’s right up there with Eleanor Roosevelt and the others. I mean she’s largely forgotten today I think but we should remember that during the ‘50s and ‘60s she was a towering figure. And even people who know nothing about classical music knew something about what Marian Anderson stood for and I think that symbolism can have enormous power and I think in her case it really did just as it did for Jackie Robinson and for some of the other figures. And I think we have not fully appreciated the power of art and culture in music to set the stage for the political change and it’s one of the great new frontiers in civil rights studies. I’m doing a book now on Arthur Ashe; I see him in some ways in the same mold as someone who ultimately is a very important figure in the civil rights struggle but it’s-- he’s not really at the center of it and yet I think his life just as Marian Anderson’s life influenced millions of people in a positive way. Jo Reed: Tell me what surprised you as you did the research for this book. Ray Arsenault: Well, a lot of things surprised me. I have to confess I didn’t know a great deal about the classical music world or about the place of African Americans in it and I-- it was a wonderful kind of journey of discovery for me in that sense. When I started I had some doubts that I could write an entire book on a half-hour concert. Of course, it’s not just about the concert. It’s about her life and the consequences of-- and causes of the concert but still the center of it is the concert and I worried a bit, maybe it should just be a journal article, but as I got into it I realized that there were so many connections and so many people involved, and it reminded me of the contingency of history, the power of contingent events, of the unpredictability of history and that when certain people make the right decision at the right time through acts of courage or conviction or conscience they can change things. And there’s no guarantee of that but I think Marian Anderson is a classic example of that where-- I mean she could have backed out-- she was very uncomfortable doing the concert-- and she would have been remembered as a good singer, but obviously she wouldn’t have become Marian Anderson. And I think again Eleanor Roosevelt had to take some chances, Franklin Roosevelt, Walter White. All of the people involved they were important characters including the DAR. The DAR had enormous currency in American life in those days and the fact that they turned her away and the fact that Eleanor Roosevelt was one of their members, not-- never a particularly member, and that the First Lady had to take this step it created a national dialog. And it’s hard to imagine that anyone else could have done this, I mean that Marian Anderson is the indispensible figure here creating this iconic image that could get to people who probably hadn’t though very much about the American creed or about civil rights or what it was actually like to be forced to take the freight elevator when you go to a hotel or to eat in your room because you’re not going to be welcomed in the dining hall or when she was even in the North when she went to Princeton in 1937, tried to check in at Nassau Inn, they turned her away because she was black, and where did she stay that night? Albert Einstein’s house. He heard about it and for the next 18 years until the end of his life she would stay with him every year, but most towns didn’t have an Albert Einstein. And so even though she became one of the wealthiest black women in America, gave away a lot of her money in philanthropic causes, but-- and had this extraordinary life and hobnobbed with celebrities and saw more of the world than almost anyone else in the United States could see there was still a world of hurt for her and she bore it with such dignity yet she let it be known that this is not the way the world is supposed to operate. I mean I think she really had a powerful sense of herself as an American. When you think about it she came back to the United States in December of 1935. She could have stayed in Europe the rest of her life I mean and had a perfectly comfortable life but as she said, “I was an American and it just-- it hurt me to the core that I found all this freedom in Scandinavia and other parts of Europe and yet I didn’t feel that my own people appreciated me as a human being in the way that they should” and she was determined to be a role model. She’s very hard to place in the sort of normal continuum of black politics between the protest tradition of W.E.B. Du Bois and the accommodationist tradition of Booker T. Washington. She doesn’t really fit either one. She really thought that if she could somehow bring her music to the world and bring her persona to the world that somehow the prejudice would if not melt away at least it would turn a corner; it would somehow-- it was the contribution that she could make. And so I think it’s impossible to distinguish that from her voice, which of course was absolutely haunting, it was-- and people who heard her it couldn’t be anybody else but Marian Anderson; you never mistake her voice for anyone else. And it-- I mean Toscanini was right; it was really-- it really was the Voice of the Century. She was one in a million. Jo Reed: Ray Arsenault, thank you so much. Ray Arsenault: My pleasure. Jo Reed: That was Raymond Arsenault. We were talking about his book, “The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert that Awakened America.” You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening