Einstein welcomed Marian Anderson into his home in 1937

Person: Albert Einstein
Lived: 1879–1955
Field: Physics
From: German-American

The story

Marian Anderson, born in Philadelphia in 1897, was one of the great classical singers of the twentieth century. Her contralto voice won acclaim across Europe in the early 1930s, and back in the United States she gave about seventy recitals a year. Yet under the segregation of the time, she was still turned away by some American hotels and restaurants.

In 1937 she came to Princeton, New Jersey, to perform a concert. Despite her fame, the town's Nassau Inn refused to give her a room because she was Black. Albert Einstein, who had lived in Princeton since joining the Institute for Advanced Study in 1933, heard about it and invited Anderson to stay at his home. His biographer Walter Isaacson described it as a deeply personal as well as symbolic gesture.

It was the start of a long friendship. Whenever Anderson returned to Princeton she stayed with Einstein, and her last visit came just two months before he died in 1955, almost two decades later. The story of that first night was turned into a play, My Lord, What a Night, in 2021.

Two years after that first visit, Anderson became a national symbol of the fight against racial prejudice. In 1939 the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her sing at Constitution Hall in Washington. With the support of Eleanor Roosevelt, she instead sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday to a crowd of more than 75,000 and a radio audience of millions. In 1955 she became the first Black American singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera.

Einstein's hospitality fitted a wider pattern. He joined the NAACP, spoke out against segregation, and, according to a Princeton resident, once paid the college tuition of a Black student. He corresponded with W. E. B. Du Bois and in 1951 offered to testify as a character witness at his trial. He explained that, being a Jew himself, he could understand how Black Americans felt as victims of discrimination.

The house at 112 Mercer Street where Einstein lived from 1935 until his death is now a National Historic Landmark.

Why it matters

Einstein's simple act of hospitality publicly rejected segregation, offered dignity to an artist a hotel had turned away, and began a friendship between two figures who each became symbols of the fight against prejudice.