This Historic Marian Anderson Performance Made Her an Icon of the Civil Rights Movement Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

Apr 9 1939

Location: 

Washington D.C.

Marian Anderson, the legendary African American contralto, sang at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday in 1939 after she was refused a performance at Washington’s Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution because she was black. Over 75,000 people attended the performance, which was broadcast live on the radio and arranged in part by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt with the support of her husband, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, who introduced the broadcast.

It was a bold protest against racial intolerance, performed before a diverse crowd. In that moment, Anderson — despite being a fiercely private person — transformed into a symbol for the nascent civil rights movement, even inspiring a 10-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., who listened on the radio.

External sources: 

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/this-historic-marian-anderson-performan…
Posted by JFerragamo on Mar 25 2024

Staff rating: 

0

Effectiveness

How does this project help?

Activates (people)Energizes and organizes people into action. Can include emotion work
Amplifies (issue or campaign)Brings public and political attention to an issue or campaign.  Can include prefigurative action, making the invisible visible.
Shifts (culture)Shifts the cultural landscape in order to imagine and enable change.
Strengthens (community)Strengthens, builds and celebrates community through ritual and/or symbol.

Timeframe For change

This project seems to be part of a campaign with a clear long-term goal. Long-term goals tend to be things like: end racism; end homophobia; make the sun stand still in the sky. A campaign with a long-term goal also needs to have some kind of theory of change.
This performance helped to lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement. So while it had a short-term impact on American and global psyches, it also was part of a long-term fight for equality.

Notes

This was very effective. Given the wide broadcast of the performance and Anderson's history of activism, audiences both present at the performance and listening in on the radio were called to action and inspiration.