Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America »

Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History at the U niversity of South Florida, St. Petersburg. He is the author of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, which was named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times and one of the Best Books of 2006 by the Washington Post, and won the 2006 Owsley Prize of the Southern Historical Association as the best work in Southern history.

Award-winning civil rights historian Ray Arsenault describes the dramatic story behind Marian Anderson’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial—an early milestone in civil rights history—on the seventieth anniversary of her performance.

On Easter Sunday 1939, the brilliant vocalist Marian Anderson sang before a throng of seventy-five thousand at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington—an electrifying moment and an underappreciated milestone in civil rights history. Though she was at the peak of a dazzling career, Anderson had been barred from performing at the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Constitution Hall because she was black. When Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR over the incident and took up Anderson’s cause, however, it became a national issue. Like a female Jackie Robinson—but several years before his breakthrough—Anderson rose to a pressure-filled and politically charged occasion with dignity and courage, and struck a vital blow for civil rights.

In the 1963 March on Washington, Martin Luther King would follow, literally, in Anderson’s footsteps. T his tightly focused, richly textured narrative by acclaimed historian Raymond Arsenault captures the struggle for racial equality in 1930s America, the quiet heroism of Marian Anderson, and a moment that inspired blacks and whites alike.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

Raymond Arsenault delivers not a proper biography of Anderson—there have already been a couple of those, in addition to her 1956 autobiography—but a tightly focused look at the political and cultural events that led up to and came after her famous 1939 concert. It's a story that's well worth retelling.

Contents

PROLOGUE October 1964....................oo CHAPTER 1 Freedom's Child....................oo CHAPTER 2 Singing in the Dark....................oo CHAPTER 3 Deep Rivers....................oo CHAPTER 4 The Heart of a Nation....................oo CHAPTER 5 Sweet Land of Liberty....................oo EPILOGUE An American Icon, 1943-1993....................oo Acknowledgements....................oo Notes....................oo Bibliography....................oo Index....................oo