Marian Anderson

Marian Anderson was an American contralto from Philadelphia who sang music from opera to spirituals with leading orchestras in the United States and Europe between 1925 and 1965. In 1939 the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her sing to an integrated audience in Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C.; with the help of Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt she sang instead on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, before more than 75,000 people. In 1955 she became the first Black American singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera. She later served as a delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, sang at the March on Washington in 1963 and died in 1993.