12. PERSUASION – The Persuasion of Marian Anderson
Marian slowly walked to the microphones, past the single pia- nist who was accompanying her, and for the first time, viewed the entire crowd. She saw faces expectant, quiet, attentive. “I had a feeling that a great wave of goodwill poured out from these people, almost engulfing me,” she later recalled. Her manager described “a tide of strong feeling” flowing from the crowd to Marian, and when she began to sing, “it was as though the tide flowed back to them.” With Lincoln behind her looking over her shoulder, Marian closed her eyes, tilted her head upward, and began with the open- ing lines of her first song: “My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.” From these first heartfelt lyrics to the final words of her encore song, Marian commanded the stage and held the nation’s attention. She lifted her spellbound audience to a place of freedom and elation. Or, as a friend of Marian’s described it, “Something happened in all of our hearts. I came away almost walking on air.” Five years after Marian’s historic performance, a fifteen-year- old high schooler won a public speaking contest — the first one he ever entered. In his award-winning speech, he spoke of the influ- ence Marian’s concert had on him, “She sang as never before, with tears in her eyes. When the words of ‘America’ and ‘Nobody Knows de Trouble I Seen’ rang out over that great gathering, there was a hush on the seas of uplifted faces, black and white, and a new bap- tism of liberty, equality, and fraternity.” The young man’s name was Martin Luther King, Jr.
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