Anne Brown

Anne Brown was refused a place at the Peabody Institute for being Black, and became instead, at sixteen, the first African American singer admitted to the Juilliard School, where she studied with Lucia Dunham. In 1933 she wrote to Gershwin about his planned opera; he auditioned her and kept writing for her, and the part of Bess grew from a secondary role into the one that named the work. She protested the segregated house at Washington's National Theatre in 1936, producing its first integrated audience. She settled in Oslo in 1948, citing American racial prejudice, taught there, and received the Peabody Medal in 1998.