The Voice on the Steps

In 1939, Marian Anderson stood on the marble steps of the Lincoln Memorial and sang. The Daughters of the American Revolution had barred her from Constitution Hall because of her race. So Eleanor Roosevelt helped arrange something far grander — an open-air concert before 75,000 people gathered on the National Mall.

Anderson was the granddaughter of enslaved people. She had scrubbed floors to pay for voice lessons in Philadelphia. And now her contralto voice — which Arturo Toscanini once called a voice "heard once in a hundred years" — rolled across the reflecting pool and into history.

She opened with "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." The irony was breathtaking. A Black woman, shut out of a concert hall by the nation's social elite, now singing of liberty at the feet of the Great Emancipator's statue.

Mary's Magnificat in Luke 1 carries that same holy reversal. A teenage peasant girl from Nazareth — a town so insignificant people joked about it — declares that the Almighty has "scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts" and "lifted up the humble." She announces that God fills the hungry while the rich go away empty.