- Headline
-
Women In The News
- Publication Date
- Tuesday, February 28, 1939
- Historical Event
-
Marian Anderson Performs at the Lincoln Memorial
This database includes 936 articles about this event - Article Type
- Newspaper
- Location
- Page Section and Number
- 8
- Author/Byline
- Leone Baxter
- Image Text
- Brief but furious riot, echoing in mild international complications, attended attempts of non-Nazis to break up a meeting of the Bund of Nazi sympathizers in New York recently. But the constitutional rights of peaceful assemblage and free speech were enforced by the police for the Bund members.
It is a little bewildering to see agitators for Naziism, wearing the foreign uniform of Storm Troopers, brazenly flaunting the swastika emblem in the shadow of the stars and stripes, decrying democracy, meeting in a major hall of America's largest city under protection of American police.
And in face of that situation it is nothing less than astonishing to find the Daughters of the American Revolution denying a distinguished American citizen the right to appear in the D.A.R. hall in the District of Columbia — not because of un-Americanism, but because of the color of her skin! For that American citizen, Miss Marian Anderson, had no wish to expound any foreign undemocratic theory nor to condemn any American institution. A great singer, she merely wished to give a concert for music-lovers who enjoy her glorious voice.
But Miss Anderson, besides being a great artist, is a negress.
It ill behooves the Daughters of the American Revolution — descendants of the men who fought to wrest freedom from autocracy and risked their lives to make possible the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States—to shut a door in the face of a woman of American birth because of the color of her skin!
It would be better if those eastern women would take to heart the counsel of California's Mrs. James E. Wales, of Berkeley, who speaking before the D.A.R. convention at San Francisco last week, urged women to "preach tolerance, freedom and liberty, to continue to be worthy of the great heritage of the past."
If Americans are to permit enemies of constitutional government to agitate against it publicly, to mingle shouts of "Heil Hitler!" with jeers at the president of the United Statese—because of our rigid observance of the constitutional rights of free speech and assemblage, and then, in defiance of the entire spirit of that constitution, deny an American girl the privilege of singing in a building called "Constitutional Hall," it is high time that public opinion force a revaluation of American principles of liberty in certain quarters. - History Unfolded Contributor
- Ashley O.
- Location of Research
- Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com)
Learn More about this Historical Event: Marian Anderson Performs at the Lincoln Memorial
- Marian Anderson and the Easter Sunday Concert, April 9, 1939 (National Archives and Records Administration, Rediscovering Black History)
- File copy of letter from Eleanor Roosevelt to president general of the DAR. (National Archives and Records Administration)
- Eleanor Roosevelt and Marian Anderson (Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library)
- February 26, 1939 - Eleanor Roosevelt Resigns from the Daughters of the American Revolution (Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library)
- Marian Anderson Performs on the National Mall (National Geographic Society)
Bibliography
Arsenault, Raymond. The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert that Awakened America. Bloomsbury Press, 2009.
Black, Allida. “Championing a Champion: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Marian Anderson ‘Freedom Concert’.”Presidential Studies Quarterly (Fall 1990), 719–736.
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