PRESERVED FILMS

From Marian Anderson: The Lincoln Memorial Concert (1939)
Transfer Note: One sequence transferred from a 35mm print preserved and reconstructed by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Running Time: 8 minutes.

Using its extensive Hearst Metrotone News Collection and an NBC radio broadcast, the UCLA Film and Television Archive has created, insofar as surviving material makes it possible, a full concert film of a key event in U.S. civil rights history: the 1939 Easter Sunday concert at the Lincoln Memorial by the African American contralto Marian Anderson. 

In early 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution declined music impresario Sol Hurok’s request to book Marian Anderson into its Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. Her race was evidently the reason. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt then resigned from the DAR, an act that increased public awareness of the controversy. Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes arranged for a concert on the Lincoln Memorial steps. On April 9, 1939, Marian Anderson sang before a live audience of seventy-five thousand and a national radio audience of millions more.

Seen here is a draft of UCLA’s re-creation of the first eight minutes of the event, including Ickes’s introduction and Anderson’s first number, “America.” Something of a national hymn for the United States, its tune goes back to the seventeenth century and was used in Britain to accompany “God Save the King.” Anderson sings two stanzas of the 1832 “My Country ’Tis of Thee” lyrics, written primarily by Samuel F. Smith.

For her remaining five concert selections, Anderson sang classical arias and gospel spirituals, and she concluded with the encore “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” Although she had not planned to comment, at the end she told the audience, “I am overwhelmed. I just can’t talk. I can’t tell you what you have done for me today. I thank you from the bottom of my heart again and again.”

The politics aside, Marian Anderson had a voice like few others and a way of seeming to reach not just her famous three-octave range but into a deep emotional core that held audiences spellbound. The unifying idealism of “America” from this singer in this setting made for an unrepeatable moment. UCLA’s reconstruction helps bring it back to us.—Scot Simmon

About the Preservation
Funding for this project was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Joseph Drown Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the National Film Preservation Foundation. Technical services were provided by Film Technology Company, Audio Mechanics, and DJ Audio.

Further Reading
The first full biography of Marian Anderson is Allan Keiler’s Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey (Scribner, 2000).