Emma Hamilton Dancing

Shirley Graham Du Bois was born in 1896. Before attending Yale, she studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and earned a B.A. and an M.A. in music from Oberlin College in Ohio. While there she composed and wrote the libretto for the opera Tom-Tom, which drew on West African music, which she had first encountered while in France, as well as jazz, blues, and traditional European opera. She was the director of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) Negro Unit in Chicago before enrolling at the Yale Drama School in 1938. Although she was unable to finish her Ph.D. and left in 1940, she wrote a number of significant plays while at Yale, including It’s Morning, Dust to Earth, and Elijah’s Ravens, focusing largely on themes of the African-American experience.

In 1943, she began working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as a field secretary, writing biographies of famous African-American figures. Through W.E.B. Du Bois, the civil rights activist and public intellectual and a longtime friend of her father’s, she became increasingly involved in civil rights activism and joined the Communist Party. She and Du Bois married in 1951; however, they were harassed due to their leftist political leanings. Both were forced out of the NAACP, and Du Bois was placed under federal investigation. In 1961, they gave up their American citizenship and moved to Ghana, where they were involved in the pan-African movement.

Following her husband’s death in 1963, Du Bois continued working under President Kwame Nkrumah’s administration until a 1966 coup forced her into exile in Cairo. After extensive petitioning she was able to return to the United States in the early 1970s, where she continued to write biographies and taught at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Graham died of cancer while on one of her frequent trips to China on March 27, 1977.