When They Told Her She Didn't Belong

In 1939, Marian Anderson was one of the greatest contraltos the world had ever heard. Conductor Arturo Toscanini declared she possessed "a voice heard once in a hundred years." Yet when she sought to perform at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., the Daughters of the American Revolution refused her — because of the color of her skin.

They had the power to close a building. They did not have the power to define who she was.

Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR in protest. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes arranged something far grander: the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, on Easter Sunday, 1939. Seventy-five thousand people gathered on the National Mall. Millions more listened by radio. Marian Anderson stepped to the microphone, and what came out first was "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" — a song about belonging to a place that had not always claimed her.

She sang it because she knew something her critics had not grasped: her identity was not theirs to grant or revoke. It had been given to her by the One who formed her voice, who had knit together a gift that no human authority could unmake.