My father’s mother Sallie was not good at all when it came to racial bias, but I remember her calling us upset in September, 1973, when she heard that the great Diana Sands had died very prematurely of cancer. Grandma had seen her on Broadway in A Raisin in the Sun fourteen years earlier.
When Leontyne Price would say that she didn’t get involved in politics because her singing opera was itself a political statement, I think that was a cop-out and I think that it wasn’t. When a lot of Atlanta’s white elite didn’t want her singing Donna Anna on the opening night of the Met’s season there in 1964, she stopped the show cold in “Non, mi dir.” Yes, that was an accomplishment on all fronts.