Marian Anderson: The Whole World in Her Hands

Marian Anderson is a contralto and international singer that triumphed over racial prejudice and became an inspiration for America’s civil rights movement. Born in 1897, the granddaughter of enslaved Americans, Anderson earned international acclaim in Europe by 1935. Still, in 1930’s America, Anderson was discriminated against and denied a performance at The Daughters of the American Revolution’s (DAR) Constitution Hall in 1939. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR and an integrated team of activists from the NAACP to Howard University joined Secretary of the Interior, Henry Ickes and others to challenge the Jim Crow laws and ideologies of this country.