Remembering a Great American Hero Marian Anderson

• 1957 – During the 1950s, Marian Anderson was becoming one of the most admired and dependable black celebrities in government circles - a black woman of extraordinary accomplishments - who was loyal, patriotic, and reluctant to criticize publicly the treatment of blacks. Official Washington recognition of Marian came during the first month of the new year, when she sang the National Anthem at inauguration ceremonies for President Eisenhower’s second term. Since one of the most dramatic and symbolically important breakthroughs for blacks during his first term was Marian’s Metropolitan Opera debut, the Eisenhower administration wanted to keep her accomplishment before the public. Already underway, in fact, were State Department plans for her to act as a goodwill ambassador as part of its gradually expanding program of international cultural exchange. Anxious to combat Soviet propaganda that democratic ideals in the United States counted for little when it came to minorities, State Department officials were eager to include black artists in their plans. The American National Arts Foundation had earlier considered sending Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price to the Soviet Union as part of an American-Soviet cultural exchange, which never materialized. For their part, in 1955 the Soviet Union had already sent to the United States Emil Gilels and David Oistrakh, whose debuts were among the most sensational musical and political events of the decade. It was not Hurok, but Columbia Artists Management that presented them to the American public. When Hurok was ready in 1956 to engage in his own cultural exchange mission with the Soviet Union, he gave no thought to Marian Anderson. For Hurok, Marian Anderson, now in the last decade of her career, was no longer a useful player in the high-stakes cultural competition the Soviets had initiated. Shrewd as ever, Hurok countered by sending two of his young popular artists in their artistic prime – Isaac Stern and Jan Peerce. The State Department thought differently, aware of the impact Marian’s Met debut was having abroad - especially in Asian countries. Flush with new funding to expand cultural exchanges, they engaged the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), that had been sending artists abroad since the 1940s as a contractor and advisor to the State Department’s U.S. Information Agency (USIA) to help organize cultural exchanges. ANTA would help the State Department considerably expand its cultural exchange activities to Asia and Africa. While Hurok was planning carefully for the day when he could bring the Soviet Moisevev dancers and the Bolshoi Ballet to America, the USIA and ANTA were putting together its plans to send Marian on the most ambitious and extended tour of Southeast Asian countries ever undertaken by an American artist. • 1957 – Beginning in the last week of September, ANTA and the USIA arranged for Marian to give twenty-six concerts, along with speaking engagements, for 9-weeks through November 30th, in twelve Asian countries. She officially represented the United States as a Special Envoy/Good Will Ambassador. Seoul and Pusan would be the first stops. Formosa, Hong Kong, and Manila would follow in early October, with concerts in Saigon, Phnom-Penh (Cambodia), Rangoon, Bangkok, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur during the remaining weeks of October. In November, Marian traveled to Ceylon (Colombo and Kandy) and then India (Madras, Bombay, New Delhi, and Calcutta). Engagements in Pakistan (Dacca, Lahore, and Karachi) would bring the tour to an end. For some years, Marian had refused to sing more than fifty concerts per season. But her love for her country prevailed! Having turned sixty that year with her voice naturally starting to get tired, she was asked to sing nearly thirty concerts in two months’ time. Planning a “See It Now” television program, a full CBS camera crew of technicians carrying 1,500 pounds of equipment was sent along with Edward R. Murrow, the leading news journalist of the day, to record Marian’s historic feat. The program was aired on the national TV show “See It Now” upon their arrival home in December. That show, narrated by Murrow titled: “The Lady From Philadelphia” can still be viewed today by clicking on to this Internet link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6af3IpB9_Ho . A historical note: In May 1954 following the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of the Supreme Court, the Eisenhower administration was criticized by blacks because of his cautious attitude toward civil rights, especially his unwillingness to act against state-imposed segregation. On September 4, 1957, the issue of school desegregation erupted in the South with ugly force when Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas ordered the national guard to prevent nine black students from attending Little Rock High School. For three weeks the crisis mounted. When Faubus withdrew the national guardsmen on September 23rd, leaving the students to face an angry mob of several thousand that surrounded the school, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock the next morning. That evening in Seoul, Marian and Rupp were scheduled to give the first concert of the tour. Thereafter on the tour, in interviews and press conferences, the reporters and interviewers continually tried hard to bait her. The CBS camera crew recorded very little of what she told interviewers in Asia, although she did recall some of what she said to an interviewer back in the States a few months after the tour: “We told them that it [the trouble in Little Rock] was an unfortunate thing, and that we were sorry it happened. We felt very grieved about it. We didn’t go into any long discussion. This was neither the time, nor the place for it, and we were not sufficiently acquainted with the developments. We were there because we believe in America and if you don’t believe in a thing, you shouldn’t try to represent it.” Unfortunately, her only comment preserved in the “See It Now” broadcast was taken from a press conference in Rangoon. When one of the reporters asked her “Would you like to sing for Governor Faubus in Little Rock?”, she answered without hesitation: “If it could help at all I should be very delighted to. If Governor Faubus would be in the frame of mind to accept it for what it is, for what he could get from it, I should be very delighted to do it.” What she wanted to convey was that her singing, as a gift not altogether of her own doing, was bound up inextricably with her love for others and her faith. Like one’s faith, she was unwilling to deny the gift of her singing to anyone ready to benefit from it.