Gerald Horne - Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois

Thank you for buying this ebook, published by NYU Press.

Sign up for our e-newsletters to receive information about forthcoming books, special discounts, and more!

Sign Up!

A publisher of original scholarship since its founding in 1916, New York University Press Produces more than 100 new books each year, with a backlist of 3,000 titles in print. Working across the humanities and social sciences, NYU Press has award-winning lists in sociology, law, cultural and American studies, religion, American history, anthropology, politics, criminology, media and communication, literary studies, and psychology.

RACE WOMAN

GERALD HORNE

The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London

2000 by New York University
All rights reserved
All photographs courtesy of David Graham Du Bois.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Horne, Gerald.
Race woman : the lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois / Gerald Horne.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-8147-3615-7 (alk. paper)
1. Du Bois, Shirley Graham, 19061977. 2. Afro-American
womenBiography. 3. Afro-AmericansBiography. 4. Afro-American
women political activistsBiography. 5. Afro-American women authors
Biography. 6. Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 18681963.
7. Afro-AmericansPolitics and government20th century. 8. Afro-Americans
Intellectual life20th century. I. Title.
E185.97.D69 H67 2000
305.488960730092dc21 00-008809

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

All illustrations appear in two groups following p.

This book had its origins in a chance encounter on a mid-Manhattan street in the late summer of 1993. I had just left the offices of the radio station WBAI when I bumped into David Du Bois, whom I had known as a result of my earlier research on the life of W. E. B. Du Bois. As we were chatting he mentioned casually that the papers of his mother, Shirley Graham Du Bois, were in his apartment in Cairo. I asked how large the collection was and he indicated that it was substantial. Immediately, I made plans to visit there in December 1993, which I did, laptop in tow. Throughout this project David has been extremely generous in providing me with insight, counsel, and hospitality. Thanks to David, his mothers papers will soon be housed in an archive in the United States.

Traveling to Cairo was the beginning of a journey that eventually took me to libraries at Georgetown, Howard, Oberlin, Stanford, Columbia, Fisk, Tulane, the University of Michigan, Wayne State University, New York University, and the University of Texas. Librarians and archivists there and at the Library of Congress, National Archives, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Hoover Institute, Indiana Historical Society, National Archives of Ghana, Niebyl-Procter Library, and the Reference Center for Marxist Studies all proved to be exceedingly helpful. I thank them all.

My original visit to Egypt was subsidized by the Center for Black Studies at the University of CaliforniaSanta Barbara, and part of my research was also supported by the Institute of African-American Research at the University of North CarolinaChapel Hill. Librarians at both of these institutions provided enormous assistance in retrieving books and articles through interlibrary loan and other means.

I profited immensely from exchanges with a number of scholars and intellectuals, including Ernest Allen, Martha Biondi, Carole Boyce-Davies, John Bracey, Annie Chamberlin, Barbara Foley, Kevin Gaines, Paula Giddings, James Hatch, Mae Henderson, Savi Horne, Tera Hunter, Bernard Jaffe, James and Esther Jackson, Oliver Jones, Chana Kai Lee, D. Sonyini Madison, Louis Massiah, Henry and Roselyn Richardson, Abbott Simon, Ula Taylor, Penny von Eschen, Alan Wald, Michael West, and Mary and Chris Young.

From infancy the strongest influences on me have been my mother and my three sisters. They merit my most profound thanks for helping me shape this book and, indeed, accomplish virtually everything I have done in life.

Shirley Graham Du Bois was born in the United States in 1896 and died in China in 1977. During her event-filled life, this diminutive, light brownskinned woman with a broad gray streak in her hair was variously a composer, playwright, actress, drummer, biographer, editor, novelist, and political activist. However, the zenith of her life may have been the time she spent in the 1960safter the death of her spouse, W. E. B. Du Boisas a pivotal advisor and official in the government of Kwame Nkrumahs Ghana. Despite this shining list of accomplishments, for which she should be considered one of the leading black women intellectual activists of this or any other century, the life of Shirley Graham Du Bois has been cloaked in obscurity, at least since her death. An examination of her life not only brings back from oblivion an intriguing figure, it also sheds light on the ever important questions of blacks and cultural production, blacks and the Left, Pan-Africanism, blacks and U.S. foreign policy, blacks and feminism, and, not least, W. E. B. Du Bois himself.

She was a mercurial and creative person, who played fast and loose in recounting the details of her own life

Not least because she occasionally fudged the details of her life and was averse to introspection, reconstructing the life of Shirley Graham Du Bois provides a real challenge to a biographer. Her peremptory dismissal of the virtues of the self-examined life was Not surprisingly, it is easier for the biographer to uncover evidence of her public stances and maddeningly difficult to reconstruct her private self.

This may be true of many biographical subjects, but the problem has been complicated further here because of her deliberate obfuscation of the simplest details of her life. For example, she claimed that her first husband, whom she left in the 1920s after bearing two children, died. This was not accurate: he lived on after their breakup. Why she divorcedor, for that matter, why she marriedremains unclear. This is one of many examples that could easily lead to the conclusion that she was as creative in devising her own character as she was in devising the characters in her plays and stories.

On the other hand, there were understandable reasons for her parsimony with the truth. At the time, not only was divorce frowned on, but marriage itself was seen as questionable for those women like Graham who opted to pursue careers. In the state of her birth, Indiana, one black schoolteacher confided that she never married, although she had been asked, because in the 1930s and 1940sand even more so in the 1920sto have done so would have cost her the position. The prevailing ideology of racial uplift, which suggested that an educated and talented woman like Graham Hence, is it fairer to say that Graham was frugal with the facts or that societal norms pushed her in this direction?

Or consider her sojourn in Ghana, where manynotably non-Ghanaiansconsidered her imperious and officious. Strikingly, these descriptions of her did not arise so forcefully and consistently until she arrived in Africa. Was officiousness an organic aspect of her personality, or was this perception of her grounded in the reality that manymale and female alikehad difficulty accepting and dealing with a woman who wielded real power in a West African society that had not rejected male supremacy altogether? Or did societal norms compel her to assume that her marriage to a renowned figure like Du Bois necessitated a shift in how she presented herself?