Editor's note: This article is reproduced from a blog post with permission from the St. Paul-based Schubert Club. The eldest daughter of what she called a "terribly conservative middle-class Black family," Anne Brown (1912-2009) grew up in a West Baltimore neighborhood, then home to the city's segregated Black elite. A powerful, music-loving Baltimorean encouraged her to apply to the Juilliard School in New York. At the age of only 16, she became the first Black student admitted to that conservatory. In 1933, while still at Juilliard, she read that George Gershwin was composing an opera titled Porgy about African Americans in Charleston, S.C. She decided to write to him. The composer promptly invited her to audition: "I had brought songs by Schubert, Brahms and Massenet, and I also had one of his own songs, 'The Man I Love,' to perform for him."
