Shattering racial barriers with her voice, Marian Anderson, a renowned contralto from Philadelphia, performed a wide variety of music all over the world. Her performance at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, 1939 in front of 75,000 people and the millions listening over the radio came about when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her sing to an integrated audience at Constitution Hall transforming this concert into an emblem of the birth of the civil rights movement in America. In 1955 became the first African American to sing at the Metropolitan Opera, and she also sang at the inaugurations of Eisenhower (1957) and Kennedy (1961).
Singing at the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963” was another expression of her solidarity with the Civil rights movement.
