Marian Anderson, (born February 27, 1897, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died April 8, 1993, Portland, Oregon), American singer, one of the finest contraltos of her time. Marian Anderson sang in the Baptist church choir of Philadelphia when she was six. But she only received a real musical education from the age of 17. In 1925 she won first prize in a singing competition from among 300 applicants and was then allowed to perform with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. In the early 1930s she toured Europe and performed in places like Berlin, London and Paris as well as in Spain, Poland, Italy, Latvia and Russia for the monarchs of Norway, Sweden, England and Denmark. The composer Jean Sibelius and the conductor Arturo Toscanini, who conducted several concerts for her, praised her voice as a talent of the century. In 1939 the Conservative Women's Association Daughters of the American Revolution prevented Anderson from performing on the stage at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. because of her skin color. Thereupon Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the then President Franklin D. Roosevelt, resigned from the organization in protest against this racial discrimination. The Roosevelts then organized an open-air concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939, attended by around 75,000 people.

On January 7, 1955, Marian Anderson appeared as Ulrica in Verdi's opera Un ballo in maschera as first African-American soloist at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. In 1957, Marian Anderson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1958 she represented the USA as an envoy to the United Nations. In 1961 she sang the national anthem during the inauguration of John F. Kennedy as a sign of the intended equality of African American people. In 1963, Kennedy awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1965, Marian Anderson ended her career and lived in seclusion with her husband, the architect Orpheus Fischer, on a farm in Connecticut. In 1970 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Michigan State University. In 1978 she received the Congressional Gold Medal of the US Congress and the Kennedy Prize, in 1986 the National Medal of Arts and in 1991 the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.