Barbara Smith Conrad

Barbara Smith Conrad was born on August 11, 1937 in Atlanta, Texas, USA as Barbara Louise Smith.

She was part of the Precursors, the first African-American students to attend and integrate The University of Texas at Austin. As one of the first African-American undergraduates admitted to the university in 1956, the young music student was among the early pioneers in the movement to create a more open and diverse university community.

Harry Belafonte, the singer, actor and civil rights activist, offered to pay for her education at another university if she wished to transfer because of the controversy surrounding her selection to play in an interracial production of "Dido and Aeneas". However, she remained at UT-Austin until her graduation in 1959. Belafonte later invited her to audition in New York. The trip was financed by Eleanor Roosevelt, who as First Lady in 1939 had arranged for singer Marian Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial after the Daughters of the American Revolution turned her away from Constitution Hall because they didn't want a black woman performing there.

She was an actress, known for The Metropolitan Opera Presents (1977), Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years (1977) and When I Rise (2010).

She performed with New York's Metropolitan Opera for eight years, from 1982-89, and performed leading operatic roles with the Vienna State Opera, the Teatro Nacional de Venezuela, the Houston Grand Opera, the New York City Opera, the Pittsburgh Opera and many other opera houses throughout the US, Canada, Europe and South America. Under the direction of some of the world's leading conductors, she performed much of the mezzo-soprano repertoire with the world's greatest orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic and the London, Boston, Cleveland and Detroit symphonies. The UT Austin Ex-Students' Association named her a Distinguished Alumna in 1985 and the university honored her with the founding of the Barbara Smith Conrad Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Fine Arts.

She received the Texas Medal of Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement and the History-Making Texan Award in 2011. She was appointed to the Butler School of Music as a visiting professor and artist-in-residence in 2012, and she spoke at the commencement ceremony for the College of Fine Arts that year. Prior to that, she returned to give master classes and to coach opera students in the 1990s, and she performed in two concerts in the school in 2011.