Du Bois, Shirley Graham

November 11, 1896
March 27, 1977

Writer and political activist Shirley Graham Du Bois was born Lola Bell Graham in 1896 near Indianapolis, Indiana, the daughter of an African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) minister. She studied music at the Sorbonne and Harvard University, and from 1929 to 1931 she headed the music department at Morgan College in Baltimore. In 1931 she enrolled at Oberlin College, where she earned bachelor's and master's degrees. In 1932 her opera Tom-Tom was staged at the Cleveland Stadium. She became director of the Chicago unit of the Federal Theatre Project and then received a Rosenwald Fellowship for creative writing, which she used for study at Yale from 1938 to 1940.

Graham directed YWCA theater groups until the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) employed her as a field secretary in New York, a position she held from 1942 until 1944. During this period she began her series of biographies for young adults of noteworthy African Americans. Graham held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1945–1947 and a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1950. On February 14, 1951, she married her longtime friend and adviser, W. E. B. Du Bois, and devoted her energies to causes he championed.

At the invitation of President Kwame Nkrumah, the couple moved to Ghana in 1961, the year she also became a founding editor of Freedomways. From 1964 to 1966 Graham was the organizing director of Ghana television. When a coup toppled Nkrumah, she moved to Cairo. The U.S. Department of Justice would not permit her to return to the United States, citing her membership in numerous subversive groups. She died of cancer in Beijing in 1977.

See also Du Bois, W. E. B

Bibliography

Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. "Shirley Graham Du Bois." In Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Darlene Clark Hine. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Carlson, 1993.

Horne, Gerald. Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

christine a. lunardini (1996)
Updated bibliography