Graham, Shirley (1896–1977), author, political activist, musical director, composer, and multitalented recipient of the National Academy of Arts and Letters Award for contributions to American literature. Shirley Lola Graham, the only daughter of Etta Bell Graham and Reverend David A. Graham, was born on 11 November 1896 in Indianapolis, Indiana, the oldest of five children. Free-spirited, talented, and ambitious, Graham resisted the shackles of race and gender. She divorced her first husband, worked to support two sons, and established a career for herself at a time when women had only recently gained the right to vote.
In 1926, Graham studied music and French at the Sorbonnne. Although her tenure there predates the Negritude movement, her musical training was enriched by interaction with African and Afro-Caribbean students in Paris. In 1931, she enrolled with advanced standing as a sophomore at Oberlin College in Ohio. Her statement of intent there, recorded in the college's archives, made clear her goals of doing “constructive work with Negro music” and research in Africa.
Graham's breakthrough in musical theater came when she turned her one-act play, Tom-Tom, into an opera. Billed as Tom-Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro with an all-black cast, the widely publicized opera opened in June 1932 at Cleveland Stadium. It received mixed reviews, though most were positive. While not the first ““all-Negro”” opera some sources reported, it was the first produced by an African American woman.
Completing a bachelor's degree in 1934, and a master's in music history and fine arts at Oberlin in June 1935, Graham worked with the Federal Theater Project directing, designing sets, and composing musical scores that included the theme songs for John Brownwell's Mississippi Rainbow (1936) and Theodore Ward's Big White Fog (1937). In 1938, a Rosenwald Fund grant financed two years of study at the Yale School of Drama, where she composed the music for Owen Dodson's Garden of Time and then turned to writing plays. Her works include a musical entitled Deep Rivers (1939); It's Morning (1940), a one-act tragedy about a mother who contemplates infanticide; I Gotta Home (1940), a one-act drama; Track Thirteen (1940), a comedy for radio and her only published play; Elijah's Raven (1941), a three-act comedy; and Dust to Earth (1941), a three-act tragedy.
Graham's inability to make the plays commercially successful Broadway shows frustrated her, as a letter to W. E. B.Du Bois (25 Apr. 1940) indicates, “If I had no responsibility other than myself I’d feel perfectly safe to strike out into the professional world and take what comes.” Her positions became increasingly political. As director of the YWCA-USO at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, her politics against racism caused her dismissal. She went on to become NAACP field secretary in New York.
In 1951, Shirley Graham married Du Bois and moved to Ghana with him in 1961. While some biographers note that in Du Bois's shadow her work suffered or that her creative aspirations were submerged to his causes, closer observation reveals his causes were hers. She merely switched genres, using language instead of music. Her intent changed little from that articulated in 1931—to do research in Africa and to bring the achievements of African Americans to the attention of the world. The critical biographies she wrote accomplish this goal.
Graham authored the following works: Dr. George Washington Carver, Scientist (1944), a biography for young readers; Paul Robeson: Citizen of the World (1946), also for young readers; There Once Was a Slave (1947), the Messner Prize-winning historical novel on the life of Frederick Douglass; Your Most Humble Servant (1949), the Anisfield-Wolf Prize-winning biography of Benjamin Banneker; The Story of Phillis Wheatley (1949); The Story of Pocahantas (1953); Jean Baptiste Pointe duSable: Founder of Chicago (1953); Booker T.Washington: Educator of Hand, Head, and Heart (1955); His Day Is Marching On (1971), a memoir of W. E. B. Du Bois; Gamal Abdel Nasser, Son of the Nile (1972); Zulu Heart (1974), a novel set in South Africa; Julius K. Nyerere: Teacher of Africa (1975); and A Pictorial History of W. E. B. Du Bois (1976). Her most important political essays include ““Egypt Is Africa”,” ““The Struggle in Lesotho”,” and ““The Liberation of Africa: Power, Peace and Justice”,” all published in the Black Scholar (May, Sept., and Nov. 1970). She also was founding editor of Freedomways.
Shirley Graham Du Bois died 27 March 1977 in Beijing, China, where she was undergoing treatment for cancer. Her music, plays, meticulously researched biographies for young people, her one novel unique in its portrayal of South African whites, and the political essays seasoned with firsthand experiences secure her place in African American arts and letters.
Bibliography
- Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, 2 vols., 1976.
- Kathy Perkins, “The Unknown Career of Shirley Graham,” Freedomways
25 (1985): 6–18. - Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, ed., Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationships in 20th Century Literature, 1996
Nagueyalti Warren
