First read: Eleanor Roosevelt

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In this first read we are presented with two meaningful and powerful stories about one of America's most famous First ladies. 

Choose to either read Eleanor Roosevelt and Marian Anderson or Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery. Finish your readings entirely and then complete your Jamboard at the bottom of the page. 

Eleanor Roosevelt and Marian Anderson

Eleanor Roosevelt first met African American contralto opera singer Marian Anderson in 1935 when the singer was invited to perform at the White House.

Anderson had performed throughout Europe to great praise, and after the White House concert the singer focused her attentions on a lengthy concert tour of the United States. Beginning in 1936, Anderson sang an annual concert to benefit the Howard University School of Music in Washington, DC. These benefit concerts were so successful that each year larger and larger venues had to be found.

In January 1939, Howard University petitioned the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) to use its Washington, DC auditorium called Constitution Hall for a concert to be scheduled over Easter weekend that year. Constitution Hall was built in the late 1920s to house the DAR’s national headquarters and host its annual conventions. It seated 4,000 people, and was the largest auditorium in the capital. As such, it was the center of the city’s fine arts and music events universe.

However, in 1939, Washington, DC was still a racially segregated city, and the DAR was an all-white heritage association that promoted an aggressive form of American patriotism. As part of the original funding arrangements for Constitution Hall, major donors had insisted that only whites could perform on stage. This unwritten white-performers-only policy was enforced against African American singer/actor Paul Robeson in 1930. Additionally, blacks who attended events there were seated in a segregated section of the Hall.

The organizers of Marian Anderson’s 1939 concert hoped that Anderson’s fame and reputation would encourage the DAR to make an exception to its restrictive policy. But the request was denied anyway, and despite pressure from the press, other great artists, politicians, and a new organization called the Marian Anderson Citizens Committee (MACC), the DAR held fast and continued to deny Anderson use of the Hall.

As the controversy grew, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt carefully weighed the most effective manner to protest the DAR’s decision. Mrs. Roosevelt had been issued a DAR membership card only after the 1932 election swept her husband Franklin Roosevelt into the presidency. As such, she was not an active member of the DAR. She initially chose not to challenge the DAR directly because, as she explained, the group considered her to be “too radical” and “this situation is so bad that plenty of people will come out against it.”

Rather, Mrs. Roosevelt first led by enlightened example. She agreed to present the Spingarn Medal to Marian Anderson at the upcoming national convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). And she invited Anderson to again perform at the White House, this time for the King and Queen of England when they came to the United States later in the year. But as the weeks went on, Mrs. Roosevelt grew increasingly frustrated that more active DAR members than she were not challenging the group’s policy.

Roosevelt Resigns from the DAR

On February 26, 1939, Mrs. Roosevelt submitted her letter of resignation to the DAR president, declaring that the organization had “set an example which seems to me unfortunate” and that the DAR had “an opportunity to lead in an enlightened way” but had “failed to do so.” That same day, she sent a telegram to an officer of the Marian Anderson Citizens Committee publicly expressing for the first time her disappointment that Anderson was being denied a concert venue.

Mrs. Roosevelt addressed the issue in her My Day column, published in newspapers across the country. Without mentioning the DAR or Anderson by name, Mrs. Roosevelt couched her decision in terms everyone could understand: whether one should resign from an organization you disagree with or remain and try to change it from within. Mrs. Roosevelt told her readers that in this situation, “To remain as a member implies approval of that action, therefore I am resigning.”

Groundbreaking 1939 Lincoln Memorial Concert

Mrs. Roosevelt’s resignation thrust the Marian Anderson concert, the DAR, and the subject of racism to the center of national attention. As word of her resignation spread, Mrs. Roosevelt and others quietly worked behind the scenes promoting the idea for an outdoor concert at the Lincoln Memorial, a symbolic site on the National Mall overseen by the Department of the Interior.

Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, himself a past president of the Chicago NAACP, was excited about such a display of democracy, and he met with President Roosevelt to obtain his approval. After the President gave his assent, Ickes announced on March 30th that Marian Anderson would perform at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday.

Fearing that she might upstage Anderson’s triumphant moment, Mrs. Roosevelt chose not to be publicly associated with the sponsorship of the concert. Indeed, she did not even attend, citing the burdens of a nationwide lecture tour and the forthcoming birth of a grandchild. However, she and others lobbied the various radio networks to broadcast the concert to the nation.

On April 9th, seventy-five thousand people, including dignitaries and average citizens, attended the outdoor concert. It was as diverse a crowd as anyone had seen—black, white, old, and young—dressed in their Sunday finest. Hundreds of thousands more heard the concert over the radio. After being introduced by Secretary Ickes who declared that “Genius knows no color line,” Ms. Anderson opened her concert with America. The operatic first half of the program concluded with Ave Maria. After a short intermission, she then sang a selection of spirituals familiar to the African American members of her audience. And with tears in her eyes, Marian Anderson closed the concert with an encore, Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.

The DAR’s refusal to grant Marian Anderson the use of Constitution Hall, Eleanor Roosevelt’s resignation from the DAR in protest, and the resulting concert at the Lincoln Memorial combined into a watershed moment in civil rights history, bringing national attention to the country’s color barrier as no other event had previously done.

Mrs. Roosevelt and Marian Anderson remained friends for the rest of Mrs. Roosevelt’s life. Marian Anderson continued to sing in venues around the world, including singing the National Anthem at President Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961. She died in 1993 at the age of 96.

Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery

Eleanor Roosevelt never wanted to be a president’s wife. When her husband Franklin won his campaign for the presidency in 1932, she felt deeply troubled. She dreaded the prospect of living in the White House.

Proud of her accomplishments as a teacher, a writer, and a political power in her own right, she feared that she would have to give up her hard-won independence in Washington. As First Lady, she would have no life of her own. Like other presidential wives before her, she would be assigned the traditional role of official White House hostess, with little to do but greet guests at receptions and preside over formal state dinners.

“From the personal standpoint, I did not want my husband to be president,” she later confessed. “It was pure selfishness on my part, and I never mentioned my feelings on the subject to him.”

Mrs. Roosevelt did her duty. During her years in the White House, the executive mansion bustled with visitors at teas, receptions, and dinners. At the same time, however, she cast her fears aside and seized the opportunity to transform the role of America’s First Lady. Encouraged by her friends, she became the first wife of a president to have a public life and career.

Americans had never seen a First Lady like her. She was the first to open the White House door to reporters and hold on-the-record press conferences, the first to drive her own car, to travel by plane, and to make many official trips by herself. “My missus goes where she wants to!” the president boasted.

She was the first president’s wife to earn her own money by writing, lecturing, and broadcasting. Her earnings usually topped the president’s salary. She gave most of the money to charity.

When she insisted on her right to take drives by herself, without a chauffeur or a police escort, the Secret Service, worried about her safety, gave her a pistol and begged her to carry it with her. “I [took] it and learned how to use it,” she told readers of her popular newspaper column. “I do not mean by this that I am an expert shot. I only wish I were….My opportunities for shooting have been far and few between, but if the necessity arose, I do know how to use a pistol.”

She had come a long way since her days as an obedient society matron, and, before then, a timid child who was “always afraid of something.” By her own account, she had been an “ugly duckling” whose mother told her, “You have no looks, so see to it that you have manners.” Before she was ten, both of her unhappy parents were dead. She grew up in a time and place where a woman’s life was ruled by her husband’s interests and needs, and dominated by the domestic duties of wife and mother. “It was not until I reached middle age,” she wrote, “that I had the courage to develop interests of my own, outside of my duties to my family.”

Eleanor Roosevelt lived in the White House during the Great Depression and the Second World War. In her endless travels through America, she served as a fact-finder and trouble-shooter for her husband and an impassioned publicist for her own views about social justice and world peace. She wanted people to feel that their government cared about them. After Franklin Roosevelt’s death, she became a major force at the United Nations, where her efforts on behalf of human rights earned her the title, First Lady of the World.

People meeting her for the first time often were startled by how “unjustly” the camera treated her. Photographs had not prepared them for her warmth and dignity and poise. An unusually tall woman, she moved with the grace of an athlete, and when she walked into a room, the air seemed charged with her vibrancy. “No one seeing her could fail to be moved,” said her friend Martha Gellhorn. “She gave off light, I cannot explain it better.”

For thirty years from the time she entered the White House until her death in 1962, Eleanor Roosevelt was the most famous and at times the most influential woman in the world. And yet those who knew her best were most impressed by her simplicity, by her total lack of self-importance.

“About the only value the story of my life may have,” she wrote, “is to show that one can, even without any particular gifts, overcome obstacles that seem insurmountable if one is willing to face the fact that they must be overcome; that, in spite of timidity and fear, in spite of a lack of special talents, one can find a way to live widely and fully.”

Jamboard Response: On this jamboard you will be presented with multiple pages labeled after  few of the characteristics we had described as being "heroic". Things such as resilience, honesty, strength, and more. 

You will choose 4 of these traits which you think Eleanor shows and find evidence (quotes) from your text. Make sure each sticky note you place has your name on it as well as your quote. 