Small familial story

Many years ago, my great-aunt told me that her sisters -- my grandmother and another great-aunt -- had resigned from the DAR when the DAR refused to allow Marian Anderson to sing in Constitution Hall. I thought that was a great story.

I still think it's a great story, but it's not true. It's certainly true that many DAR members resigned from the DAR in protest, following Eleanor Roosevelt's example. It's also true that my grandmother and my great-aunt Virginia were members of the DAR. They couldn't have resigned from the DAR in protest in 1939, because they didn't join the DAR in the first place until the mid-1950s. My grandmother lived in Brazil in 1939, not the US, and was profoundly uninterested in politics and social justice. I doubt she even heard about Marian Anderson's concert.

What I like about the story is that my great-aunt, who was much younger than her sisters, really, really, really wanted her sisters to have taken the stand she would have taken herself, wanted it so much that she remembers them having taken that stand.