Zora, Eleanor, and Marian

The incident that most famously led to Eleanor Roosevelt’s reputation as a foe of segregation and discrimination was her defense of the famous opera singer Marian Anderson. In 1937, Anderson was barred from performing at Constitution Hall because of her race. Roosevelt protested by resigning her membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution which owned the hall. She also was instrumental in arranging for Anderson to perform at a special integrated out door concert on the Washington Mall. It was inspiring event that did much to show the follies of segregation.

Yet, as black author, Zora Neale Hurston observed, there was more to the story. In 1951, Hurston noted that Anderson’s manager

“had originally applied to two places-Constitution Hall, the property of the D.A.R., and the auditorium of the White High School, the property of the District of Columbia....

The D.A.R. refused their hall to Mrs. Anderson….The school board likewise refused the auditorium of the high school…Eleanor Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, et al., rushed into the fray and gave with a howl against narrow-minded racial discrimination that could be heard in Addis Ababa….But it was all directed against the D.A.R. No loud screaming against the school authorities….

And as far as the high-school auditorium is concerned, to jump the people responsible for racial bias would be to accuse and expose the accusers themselves. The District of Columbia has no home rule; it is controlled by the congressional committees, and Congress at the time was overwhelmingly Democratic. It was controlled by the very people who were screaming so loudly against the D.A.R. To my way of thinking, both places should have been denounced, or neither.

See Zora Neale Hurston, “A Negro Voter Sizes Up Taft,” Saturday Evening Post, December 8, 1951, 151-52.