Three score and 10 years ago, a concert emancipated a dream
THE SOUND OF FREEDOM: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln
Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America
By Raymond Arsenault
Bloomsbury, 309 pp., illustrated, $25
"The crowd condenses. It's standing room only, flowing the length of the reflecting pool and down West Potomac Park. The floor of this church is grass. The columns of this nave are budding trees. The vault above, an Easter sky." The date is April 9, 1939, the setting is the Lincoln Memorial, and the assembled audience is gathered prayerfully to hear Marian Anderson sing. Delia Dailey, proud scion of a "Talented Tenth" family, is about to meet the love of her life, physicist and German Jewish émigré David Strom. Black and white, African and European, intersect and commingle, and the dream of a race-blind, mulatto future is, if only for a brief hour, attained.
Delia and David are only figments of the imagination of novelist Richard Powers in his masterful 2003 work, "The Time of Our Singing," but his choice of Anderson's concert as heady symbol of racial integration is deliberate, and in its own way perfect. The story of how Anderson ended up on the steps of the memorial, performing before a crowd of tens of thousands that included her most prominent champion, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, is a tangle of the miraculous and the enervating and is well told, if overly padded, by Raymond Arsenault in "The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America."
It all began with little thought for posterity. Anderson - acclaimed by conductor Arturo Toscanini as "a voice such as one hears once in a hundred years" - was planning an American tour, after a triumphant European season. Washington, D.C., an important concert stop both for its status as the nation's capital and because of its large African-American community, was the largest city in the country without a municipal auditorium. In fact, the only venue of any size was Constitution Hall, owned and run by the Daughters of the American Revolution, a conservative women's organization.
The DAR flatly refused to book the black artist to play their whites-only hall. "No date will ever be available for Marian Anderson in Constitution Hall," her manager Sol Hurok was informed. The hideous irony of a group devoted to the ideals of the American Revolution turning an African-American performer away from a venue named after the document that guarantees freedom and equality to all was not lost on anyone. "I don't know what Constitution Hall will be used for that night," the
It took the intervention of Roosevelt to give the DAR some cause for second thoughts about the decision. Using the platform of her nationally syndicated column, Roosevelt announced her resignation from the DAR, refusing to approve, even implicitly, of its decision. The organization, as intransigently devoted to ugly prejudice as ever, devoted its resources to a new campaign against "the indiscriminate mixing of white and Negro actors on the screen."
With Constitution Hall unavailable and the larger auditoriums of the D.C. school system similarly closed to black performers, attention turned to the unprecedented idea of an outdoor concert. The thought of performing before a crowd 10 times larger than any she had ever seen, in unknown conditions, left the normally unflappable Anderson jittery. Less than eight hours before boarding a train for Washington, she called her manager, begging to be released from her contract.
Anderson's Lincoln Memorial concert, however, went off without a hitch. The show included the spirituals "Gospel Train" and "Trampin,' " and ended with the apropos "Nobody Knows the Troubles I've Seen." The audience was particularly touched by a changed lyric that may have been a nervous slip; Anderson, performing "America," sang "of thee we sing," substituting the collective for the individual. The entire concert did not quite last an hour.
Arsenault does a solid job recounting Anderson's encounter with destiny, but suffers from a significant problem: There is simply not enough to say about the subject to fill an entire book, and so "The Sound of Freedom" doubles as a brief biography of the singer, studded with asides on "Amos n' Andy" and the segregation policies of professional football. The book's middle 100 pages, on the run-up to the concert and its aftermath, are a notable addition to the historical record. The remainder of "The Sound of Freedom" is not gripping reading.
Arsenault's book is a timely reminder of the worm of history turning once more. We have only just witnessed another triumphant procession on the Washington Mall, where another exemplary African-American, himself the product of another David and Delia, was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States - something Anderson would likely have been hard-pressed to imagine taking place.
"The Sound of Freedom" is a sobering reminder of the costs - political, civic, and psychic - of arriving at a better tomorrow.
Saul Austerlitz is a regular contributor to the Globe. 