Shirley Graham Du Bois
Activist, Director, Composer, Playwright
1906-1977
Years:
Affiliations:
Federal Theatre Project, Karamu House, Howard University, Oberlin, Yale
New York, Indiana, Seattle, Ohio, Chicago, Ghana
Locations:
Connections:
WEB Du Bois, Ossie Davis, Venezella Jones
Shirley Graham Du Bois was a composer, director, playwright, arts leader and activist. She was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1896, and later in life became the second wife to W.E.B. Du Bois in 1951. Graham completed her master’s degree in fine arts and music history at Oberlin College after briefly attending the Sorbonne in France, Columbia University, Howard University and Morgan State College in Baltimore, Maryland. While she was still a student at Oberlin, she developed a relationship with Karamu House's Rowena Jeliffe. With the help of Rowena, Graham’s three-act, sixteen-scene opera, Tom-Toms: An Epic of Music and The Negro, opened at Cleveland Stadium in 1932, drawing a crowd of ten thousand. Graham became the first African American woman to write and produce an opera with an all-black cast.
She was appointed by Hallie Flanagan as the Illinois Federal Theatre Project director-supervisor of the "Negro Unit" of the Chicago Federal Theatre (1936-38). She put on wildly successful productions, including children's theatre, such as Little Black Sambo.
In 1942 she became the YWCA-USO Director of Fort Huachuca, Arizona, a military base that had fifteen thousand black men and women soldiers. She works as a Field Secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
In 1951, she married W.E.B. Du Bois, a second marriage for both of them. Shortly after, W.E.B. was indicted for "un-American" activities. Although he was acquitted for insufficient evidence, the Du Boises were frustrated by the harassment and with the lack of progress in the United States. They immigrated to Ghana in 1961. Shirley Graham Du Bois died of cancer in Beijing in 1977.
Sources: Profiles of African American Stage Performers and Theatre People, 1816-1960 by B. Peterson, Jr. (pg 78)
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