Learning about diversity

By Georgie Bright Kunkel

"As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold the person down, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might". - Marian Anderson interview, Dec. 30, 1957

For a small-town white girl who never saw a black face until I left my small town to gain a college education, I had a lot to learn about diversity. Looking back at college, I remember only white students. My only chance to branch out past my lock-step educational schedule was working for the head of the music department who was also the head of the local Civic Music Association. Because I helped take tickets, I got to attend all the concerts. I still have the worn black and white publicity photos used during the winter concert schedule. There was Raya Garbusova, cellist; Artur Rubinstein, pianist and Fritz Kreisler, violinist. Few young people today would have heard of them.

A concert artist I particularly remember was Marian Anderson, who filled the auditorium with her powerful voice and dignified persona. The music department director took me backstage to meet her and accompany her out for refreshments afterwards. It did not seem to register, at that time in my life, that she was a black woman. To me, she was a stimulating presence on stage and I shivered when she sang an emotionally packed folksong. It also did not seem unusual that my music director, his wife, young daughter and I were the only ones sitting with her in a milkshake parlor, sipping our frothy drinks, after the concert was at an end. Absent were the other dignitaries who were usually on hand to pay their respects to the other concert performers in the Civic Music series.

It was much later that I realized that Marian Anderson was not welcome at the hotel or the high class eating establishments in town because she was black. Just to think of the ostracism that she faced, going from city to city, without the social regard that she deserved. Her approach to all this was to concentrate on her concert preparation and presentation and being the finest singer that she could be.

Later I learned of her Washington, D.C. concert that was scheduled at the Daughters of the American Revolution Hall and that was subsequently cancelled because no black concert singer had ever been allowed to perform there. It was Eleanor Roosevelt who stepped in and arranged for her concert to be performed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. This courageous act on the part of Eleanor Roosevelt in a time of such open discrimination was clearly a victory for human rights.

Hopefully there will always be such models of excellence in the world as Marian Anderson to help us remember that achieving one's highest potential is possible in a free country. Our responsibility is to be vigilant so that our country's freedom is never taken for granted or taken away.

Note: The quote at the top of this column is an excerpt from the book "You're Damn Right I Wear Purple: Color Me Feminist" by Georgie Bright Kunkel, freelance writer. For more information e-mail gnkunkel@comcast.net