Born: February 27, 1897, Philadelphia, PA

Education: Philadelphia High School for Girls, graduated 1921

Died: April 8, 1993, Portland, OR

Anderson was one of the great concert singers of the twentieth century. A contralto, she sang Negro spirituals as well as songs in German, Italian, and French.

She started in Philadelphia church choirs. Rejected by a white music school, she received free instruction from a black teacher and church-paid lessons from an Italian coach. By the 1930s she often performed abroad. After her rendition of “Ave Maria” in Austria, conductor Arturo Toscanini exclaimed: “Yours is a voice one hears once in a hundred years.”

When she returned to America in 1935, however, mainstream venues ignored her. In 1938 she pursued singing at Constitution Hall but its owners, Daughters of the American Revolution, refused. This stirred black protest. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt intervened and the Secretary of the Interior arranged Anderson's recital before a live and radio audience from the Lincoln Memorial on Easter in 1939. Probably 75,000 people attended; millions tuned in. She accepted the NAACP Spingarn Award that year and became the first black singer at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1955. A soloist at the March on Washington and a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient (1963), she sang at presidential inaugurations and internationally as a Goodwill Ambassador. She also earned a Grammy Award for Lifetime Achievement (1991).