Marian Anderson: Legendary Opera Singer

singer Marian Anderson. In nineteen thirty nine, Anderson gave a concert at the Lincoln Memorial that became one of the landmark moments of the civil rights movement. Today, Rita Cockburn, who directed a New Duck mentory about Anderson, is going to give us a fresh look at Marion Anderson's truly remarkable life. I'm the land Revere and this is Seneca's one Hundred Women to Hear. We are bringing you one hundred of the world's most inspiring and history making women

you need to hear. Director producer Rita Coburn has won numerous awards for her films, including the Emmy. Her two thousand and sixteen documentary called Maya Angelus Still I Rise earned her a Peabody. Her latest film is Marion Anderson The Whole World in Her Hands. It's showing on PBS and it tells the singer story in her own voice. Listen and learn from Rita Cockburn why Marian Anderson is

one of Seneca's one hundred Women to hear. I'm speaking today to Rita Cobe, producer, director, filmmaker, and so much more about Marian Anderson, classical singer and one of the all time greats. Welcome, Rita, Thanks for having me Milan. We're looking forward to our conversation about Marian Anderson. Were she alive today, she would be celebrating her hundred and twenty fifth birthday. How did you get to make her the subject of your great documentary and how should we

remember her well? I have been in um documentary television on a local and national level for a long time now, and what I find is generally my subjects choose me, and then I chase the story until the story starts to chase me. And I had just finished Maya Angelo and really didn't of what I would do. I would have some real concerns about that what would follow Maya Angelo, you know, And I went off chasing a documentary that

didn't pan out. And then, um, I'm like, um, maryon Anderson, a real person of prayer, and I don't believe people come back to speak to you, but I do believe that what's on your heart gets in your dreams and all the rest of that. And so I was really concerned about this and had a dream and in that dream, Maya Angelo said to me, your next documentary will be on Marian Anderson. And I thought Mary and Anderson. I

wasn't thinking about her. And then she was stern with me the way that she normally was in private conversations, and she said she has my initials. M A, I will help with a start because I thought, my gracious and um. I rolled over and my computer is general a right there, and I ordered a book on her. So I had that date and I had the book My Lord, What a Morning? And it was her autobiography.

And I looked for documentaries that have been done and I saw that Weida had done one, and I went on to chase this other documentary and one year I was just so frustrated. I said, I was doing other things obviously, and then I just decided to go play golf. And when I got off the golf course in Florida, I got a call from Michael Cantor and he said, I have a documentary who won't I'd like you to

do now. He's the executive producer of American Masters and we had worked together on the Maya Angelo and he said, it's Mary and Anderson. I said, I'll do it. He said, don't you want I said no, no, no, you don't understand. I will do it. And so she chose. My daughter studied classical music at the Manhattan School of Music at Lawrence University and in Vienna, and so I was always involved in classical music and opera. Those were some of my go to UH choices of music, along with jazz,

and so I was familiar with the music. And I began to collect the books and began to read about her and read about the industry. And I really feel that it just called me. It just called me. And I've have to say to you that as this documentary is airing now, um, it's a bitter sweet for me because I've lived with her every day for the past three years and kind of don't want to let her go. I've become very engaged and very happy to excavate. Uh the life of a woman who was born in so interesting.

Just that's got to be a unique inspiration for a for a filmmaker, the one you just described. We're not only my Angelo, but Marian Anderson were both chasing you. It sounds like to to do this documentary. How is it different from other documentaries about Marian Anderson? And perhaps you can tell us were there any surprises um for you? And you were making it well? Again, the concept of chasing the story until it chases you is a very

important concept for me. So I don't go into a documentary thinking it will be made like the last one, or it will even be made the way current documentaries are on television. I think that that person has to to how they want their story to be told, and if you're very sensitive to that, you will find out why. So everything I look at lately is a drone shot, and I think that's wonderful. But there were no drones

when Marian Anderson. There were aerials. Uh. So I make sure that I try to stay in the time period. But what was most intriguing for me was that I went to the University of Pennsylvania the Kids Lack Center, where the Marian Anderson collection is housed, and I sent myself there. I have a son that lives in Philadelphia, and I just went there for three or four days, just looking and trying to feel where this story really

was and driving around the areas where she lived. And one of the things that I found was that the libraries archives were wonderful and the people there were wonderful. And David McKnight said to me, you know, we're just putting in audio recordings that we have for her that hadn't been uploaded to the archive yet, and I'll share the transcripts with you. And these recordings are real to

real tapes. Now a lot of people don't know what those are anymore, but uh, let's say they preceded the eight track tape and all the rest of that in the cassette and so on. And so I thought, in my spirit, this is something new. I need to listen. And so the reason the documentary is different is because as I listened to thirty four real to reel tapes and had them transcribed, I was able to get her voice. Now, when she did a documentary and she was alive and

she talked to you, that was one thing. But for a long time, who didn't hear her voice? And these tapes were the tapes for her preparing for her autobiography, and a lot of what she said was not in the autobiographies. And so what I did was I used her voice, and then I went to any other places where there were recordings of her voice, UM Studs, Turkle,

George Shirley and so on. And so while she's not a true narrator, she does give her opinions on what was happening, and so I think that her voice leads the way in this documentary. The other thing, therefore, that is different about it is every time she talked on an audio tape, we had to cover that with something. Because television being the visual medium, we had no pictures, and we were already heavily relying on archival footage and pictures for everything else. So I decided to do re

enactments when she was speaking. So we shot re enactments in Philadelphia, and we shot them in Chicago at a Landmark house owned by George Manning called The Beast in Home and that beast in home had a carriage house. It had a carriage from the twenties, and he's from

the turret to the seller. He kept it in nineteen twenties condition, and so we used it and the grounds around it in the re enactments to go back to her childhood, to take her to Europe and so on, and so I think that would be not a subtle but it's done subtlely, but that would be a big difference in the way that the documentary is told. M so interesting, well, tell us about her, Where did she grow up? And probably most interestingly, how is her great

gift discovered and how is it nurtured. I'm very happy that you asked that question because a lot of people see her as nine nine and the Lincoln Memorial, and of course by that time she would have been forty two. Marian Anderson grew up in Philadelphia on a street that

was integrated. She went to schools with a large diversity of people white um from different uh from different countries that were settling at the time in Um in Philadelphia, and Philadelphia was one of those border towns on the cusp of the South and the North, and her parents moved there as part of that early migration for her to have a better life. And before schools were segregated, they were integrated, and people don't understand that, and everybody

just went to school. And so she grew up in that environment in Philadelphia, which had the largest black population at that time, of people coming and gathering there. And I think that um Philadelphia was a place where when she grew up with her mother and her father, the grandmother was nearby, the grandfather was nearby. The church eventually when she moved when she was younger, was literally across

the street. And the church was social programs, it was music, it was education, it was where you would go if you were out of work, and it was a community that curtured her. And I think she was very well nurtured by her father and her aunt. Her mother was solid, but she wasn't the person who was in love with music. Her aunt was in love with music, and her father And what doesn't make the documentary her father took her to a local opera when it was in town and

when she was very young. He died when she was twelve. By the time she was twelve, she had heard classics what you would call classical European singing because that preceded obviously, uh anything like um when Thomas Dorsey came along with gospel, the fist jubilee singers. The type of singing the imflagmatis. The type of singing that was done in the Black Church was high art and it was what people learned,

and so that environment nurtured her singing. And then Roland Hayes, who was an international African descent um son of a person who was his His family called hogs. And when they called hogs, if you know this in the South, you call hogs for a very long time. You learn to have a breath that comes up and out and goes up and down, and it is what calls hogs. And his ability to do that prepared him to be able to hold notes and to go up and down the scales, and he became a person who would mentor

her for the rest of her life. And so that wonderful question that you have about the nurture, it was the family, it was the church, it was the extended community, and that is and her aunt and her father, and that's where it came from. Self fascinating. Now you mentioned nineteen thirty nine. She's probably most famous for the concert she gave outside the Lincoln Memorial in April of that year.

Let's talk about that ninety nine concert, and for those who don't know the history, perhaps you could take us through what happened and how it came about. Well. By nineteen thirty nine, Marian Anderson, out of her own agency, had saved money and had one awards, particularly won by the rosen Wall Foundation, which was the Jewish organization that

supported African Americans. The n double a c P. Right prior to that was actually in its initial it was run by Whites, and Walter White, who was black um heard her voice, and James Weldon Johnson, who uh pinned with his brother lift every voice and sing. So the artistic community was very solid. But Marion Anderson had been to Europe. Out of these Rosenwall Foundations helped her to go to Germany to study German and so before nineteen thirty nine she was seen in the world as a star,

but not in America. So America was still Jim Crow lynching people, whereas she was in the she was in Paris, London, uh. The Nordic countries embraced her most of all Sabellious Finland. This is where she was traveling when no one white or black was traveling that much. She had already had given him one year, a hundred and sixty concerts in Europe, and when Tuscanini uh said that she was her voice was one you could hear only once in a hundred years.

Saul Rock took another a Jewish man who had lived in Philadelphia, who was the impresario, the agent of the day. He took her work all across the world and really helped call a brand as we would call it today for her. So by nine nine she's come back to America. She has been to the White House and made a friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. Howard University and Walter White from the n double a c P. Wanted her to continue

to sing in Washington, DC every year. However, now because people had heard about her, there was not enough space in almost any given place. The Daughters of the American Revolution, the d a R had Constitution Hall, and Constitution Hall could seat four thousands. So everybody said, let's take her to Constitution Hall, and Constitution Hall said, we have a

whites only policy, and she cannot sing here. Essentially, and as that happened, you can imagine you sang all over the world, but in your own country you cannot go to Constitution Hall in Washington, d C. The Capital. Well, thank god for the coalitions that came together. Howard University, one of our first historically black colleges, Mary McLoyd Bethune,

who was put it in place in education. With the Roosevelt administration, they formed a committee, an interracial committee, and Saul Hurro joined in on we're going to find a place for her to sing. Now, the story gets fuzzy. We don't know if it was a person from Howard, or if it was the secretary, the Assistant Secretary of the Interior, or the chapman or the Secretary of the Interior. Uh Ikey's who said let's do it at the Lincoln Memorial. But somebody said this, and of course they went to

Eleanor Roosevelt. And as the story goes, Eleanor Roosevelt, who loved classical music and had met Marian Anderson through that and had had her not only at the White House for a private party, but also which was a big deal because black people didn't come to the White House un to the Roosevelts took this kind of position, and then so you now have this confluence of people crossing over boundaries to change some of the facade of a racial construct in America. And it's through music and it's

through art, and they got to know one another. So Eleanor Roosevelt, first Lady Eleanor Roosevelt tells the President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ken Marian Anderson sing, and he said, I've been hearing about her for so many weeks. She can sing from the top of the Washington Monument. If she wants to shore, you know, just let her sing. And once that happened, they had one week to pull everything together.

And so April ninth, nine nine, to the credit of the racism of the d A r her at the time, instead of four thousand, she sang for seventy five thousand, and as you see all the mics in front of her. She went across the world with her voice, and all across America, and even a ten year old Martin Luther King Jr. Heard her sing and was inspired and wrote his first essay that was published after that. It was a huge deal. It was you have to go back to Jim Crow ninety nine America, people being hung um,

fighting fights for freedom all around the the country. And then to see that this relationship was formed that allowed her to sing there and now you have an interracial audience, pictures of whites and blacks elbow to elbow. Why watching this woman sing and being just taken by her voice. It created a pride for African Americans. It created some coalitions, some lasting and some that did not for white Americans to say, there, you are able to do what we

thought black people could not do. We thought of them as less than human. We thought that they could be workaday billies, but not high art. We didn't think that they could learn German. My goodness, they can barely speak English. All of that was dispelled on April nine nine, such an extraordinary moment in history. Seneca has one hundred women

to hear. We'll be back after the short break. Now, that concert also turned Marian Anderson into an international symbol of the struggle for civil rights for some of the reasons that you already alluded to. What was her role in the civil rights movements starting in the forties and onward. I think that everybody says, or let's say this. There are people who felt that she was a reluctant participant.

In my research, I don't find that at all. I think that one has to understand that nineteen thirty nine and nineteen forty and nineteen fifty and nineteen sixty I love that you go over those decades were changing decades in the face of America. The first thing that happened in nineteen thirty nine was after that concert, and with the help of Saul here A, she became one of the highest paid entertainers in the world at that time.

What she was making at that time amounted to what would be four million dollars today, and for a black woman born in that was pretty much unheard of. So now she's making a lot of money, and she's now doing concerts all over America and all over the world. It's breaking down barriers, but there are still doesn't matter

how famous she is. She can't stay in certain hotels. Uh. She she comes to Princeton and that's in you know, Princeton and Albert Einstein here is that she's been turned down at a hotel and she has to stay with him, and he offers her home. Gaps were bridged their relationship became a relationship after which um Albert Einstein did a lot of work in black colleges after that meeting because he understood something. So she was chopping down barriers left

and right. Also in the forties, after a twenty four year on again off again relationship with um Orpheus King Fisher, they marry and they try to live in Danbury, Connecticut. They try to buy fifty acres. They're turned down. It said, if you don't buy a hundred, we won't sell you the property because around you, the property loses value because you are here. That's what is said to a woman who sang for kings and queens. And they sent her husband because he was light enough to pass to get

the property. But they had the agency and the funds, and they bought the hundred acres, So I will give the forties to those opportunities. In the fifties, the n double, a CP that loved her, that nurtured her, said, you know what an off of this vertical segregation where you think that that's okay, we will boycott you until you call for integration at your concerts. You have got to start somewhere. Step up, And she did and she said, Okay, if you're not going to integrate the concert, I won't

be there. That was the fifties. The fifties was also brown versus Board and the implementation of that, the killing of Emmett till the the country being torn apart. UH in the fifties with UH, with little Rock, and so in the fifties in she breaks the barrier at the Met and she sings Ulrica and Balo and Mascara, and everybody that knows opera will know that I messed that up. But at any rate, there you have it. The fifties

she calls for integrated concerts. She gets on the stage at the Met, and by that time she's almost sixty years old. She doesn't have the voice for opera anymore, but she knows that she must do it, and she must be that symbol. She rises to the occasion. The sixties is another place. The sixties brings us the Kennedys who embrace her. The sixties bring us the March on Washington,

where she makes it to the podium and sings. And it's back to that whole nine thirty nine Lincoln Memorial, having christened that in a place for civil rights and protests the first time because at that time, in nine, you're shoulder to shoulder white blacks. It's put all over the world the pictures. Now sixty three, it's a more active the march for jobs and freedom, the fight for freedom.

And she sings there by. Now though she's it's sixty three, she's sixty six and her career is beginning to close. So thank you for the forties, fifties and sixties. I think that would be the places I would land in those decades. Amazing history. Lesson Rita's Let's talk about you for a minute, and some of your other work. Eve won many awards, including an Emmy You wont up Peabody for your documentary and Maya Angelou? Why has it been important to you as a filmmaker to make films about

great women like Marian Anderson and Maya Angelou? Thank you for that. Mm hmm. Here's what I will say. My mother is nine nine years old. My father was born in nineteen sixteen. I grew up in a small town outside of Chicago's in all black town. There were two white women in that town who were married to black men. We did not know as children that they could only live there because they would not be accepted. Uh. Our schools were not integrated until nineteen sixty eight. I had

no real knowledge of white people. I had black people. I had black stories. And when I went to school, I saw none of my stories. I saw. I was erased. I was in Dick and Jane for three years. We didn't have other books. I wasn't there. I love Pippi Longstocking. Then I saw the racism in those pages, and I thought, why are our stories not told and why aren't we respected?

And I loved my community, and so as I began to write and become a storyteller, I published a book, Meant to Be, and I think it m It's sadly came out the year of Um. It was twenty oh two. Yeah, um, And so I it's kind of autobiographical, but it's a novel because I loved my community so much and I didn't see them anywhere, And so I kind of actually read a Tony Morrison book, The Bluistide, and I said, I didn't like the fact that she told our stories.

And she said that we were poor and had to stuff up a towel in in tracks so to keep wind out of the window. And I said, when I grow up, I'm going to write a book, and you're not going to be able to tell whether I'm black or white. And then I got up and I started to write and tell stories. And the storytelling morphed from books to uh two documentaries and two things. And I embraced that I could only tell who I was, and that not enough people knew. And they should know about

my community. They should know about the women who could say one word or look one way, and you learned what was in every book that you'd ever read, just by that. They should know about my mother, and they should know about Mary and Anderson, and they should know about Maya Angelo. And I would like to do documentaries on black men. I had a wonderful relationship with my father and they. I just needed to have a place

to say, let us do some of our stories. Yes, we can do other stories, and other people can do some of our stories, but you don't know me. Let me tell my story, and let me have the fun and the the and the privilege of researching about my own people. Because they were not, by and large in the history books. They were not taught to anyone, and so most of our history is oral most of it.

If you don't go listen to the tapes and listen to the people and sit in front of them, you won't know what happened because what wasn't told was also conflated into misrepresentations. So everybody has something that they must do. And I feel like the grio by the door in Africa to the village that can say seven reigns ago, this happened here and that happened there. But I get to use a camera, I get to write, and I get to research to tell you the part of our story.

And I feel very blessed to be able to do that. I'm excited to talk about who we are. That's wonderful. Now, both of these women clearly faced racism, as you've described, but their lives were full of challenges as a result, full of struggles, but also great, great achievements. What gives you hope today as we close this fascinating conversation, what

gives you hope? Rita? I think, whenever there's an injustice and one person is in the room if everything and the other person is on the outside of the door with some things, the person in the room with everything will have to open the door. And let that person in. And I have the hope as what happened with Marian Anderson, the highest woman of the land opened the door and

let her in and saw her as a person. May Angelo would always say to me, And it wasn't one of the sayings I liked the most of hers because I didn't understand it. She said, only equals can become friends, and I thought, what is she talking about? What I realized, until a person sees you as equal, you really can't be a friend. You can be a servant, you can be an associate, you can be that person down the street.

I think until I walk into companies and into UH opera houses and into grocery stores and into you know, corporations and entities and nonprofits and see black men in offices and black women and brown people in offices and everywhere throughout that that we're standing on precepts and we're not doing the work. I'm looking for the people who are going to say, put Mary McLoyd Bothoon over education. UH. Let Walter White sit down and tell us we really

have to have an anti lynching bill. Let's um, let's have UH Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden uh taught to people in the community and forge relayation ships, and let's make sure that in colleges and places that people aren't just checking boxes. So I'm hopeful that we can triumph and we will be a much better and stronger America. But I will tell you that Maya Angelo used to tell me. She said, you know, racism is something that when you wake up in the morning, it's

seeped through under the door. At night, it's gotten under the covers, and you have to scrape it off your skin. And you have to do that every day. So the more conversations we have about privilege, about bias, and the more we listen to one another, there's hope. And I believe that, well, that's a wonderful statement, and I'm afraid there's too much of that seepage today of racism. So I hope we can use the metaphor that you gave us of opening the doors and all of us be

door openers. Thank you, Rita Cockburn. You're a wonderful storyteller, and thank you for this walk through history. It's been really fascinating and you've made us so much smarter about the great Marian Anderson. Thank you for having me, Milan. I thank you for what you do. You are opening doors with your program and I really appreciate that and and respect you for it and much success. Thank you. That was really inspiring. What a great opportunity to look

back and to learn. Here are three things I took from that conversation. First, we should remember Marian Anderson for so many things, for her Lincoln Memorial Concert, for being the first African American to sing at the Metropolitan Opera, and for using her amazing voice throughout the decade to fight free equality. Second, know that when people from different backgrounds unite or a common cause, great things can happen.

Rida Coburn tells us that the Lincoln Memorial Concert took place because the confluence of people crossed over boundaries to challenge racism. Finally, let's make sure that all voices are being heard. Rida Coburn makes films about women like Marion Anderson and Maya Angelou because the history of Black Americans has been largely overlooked for so long. She asked herself,

why are our stories not being told? You can learn more about Marion Anderson the whole world in her hands By going to PBS dot org, you'll find viewing times for local station, and you can even watch the documentary online. Tune in next week to hear about our next featured woman and discover why she's one of Seneca's Women to Hear. Seneca's one hundred Women to Hear is a collaboration between the Seneca Women Podcast Network and I Heart Radio, with

support from founding partner PNG. Have a great Day.