When contralto Marian Anderson was denied an opportunity to sing at Constitution Hall in Washington, D. C., by the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution, whom we never hear about anymore but who sadly were once very much in the news for their bigoted obstruction of civil rights), First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt helped arrange for her to sing at the Lincoln Memorial on the Washington Mall.

Everyone knows this setting from Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. But Marian Anderson stood there first. And believe it or not, 75,000 people showed up on a chilly Easter Sunday for an outdoor concert by an opera singer. It was a really beautiful moment in America’s Civil Rights movement that somehow seems not to be as well known as it deserves to be.

So a couple things to share. First, here’s a link to the Wikipedia article about this concert: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Anderson:_The_Lincoln_Memorial_Concert

And here is a short newsreel video about the concert.

And here is the concert itself, from the National Archives. There’s no video, only the audio recording.

Happy Easter, everyone!

[UPDATE – I wondered if the DAR was still around. Yes, it is. And wow, does it look like a different organization than the one that kept Marian Anderson off the stage in 1939! I took a screenshot of their website page describing membership requirements. Very inclusive language now, and the video also demonstrates that descendants of “Patriots” of the American Revolution are indeed at least somewhat more, and possibly significantly more, ethnically/racially diverse than they presumably were 86 years ago. So hats off to them.]