Read this article by Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire, on the life, times and political contributions of Shirley Graham Du Bois. The composer, journalist and television director settled in Ghana during 1961 with her husband, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, the first Director of Encyclopedia Africana under the government of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. Graham Du Bois was the co-founder and first director of Ghana National Television. This report was published by the Center for Research on Globalization (www.globalresearch.ca) based in Montreal, Quebec (Canada).
Graham Du Bois attended the Sorbonne in France to study music and later enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio, renowned for its training of African American women dating back to the pre-Civil War period. She obtained both a bachelor’s and master’s degree at Oberlin in music during 1934 and 1935 respectively.
Graham Du Bois became a prolific writer, composing plays, musicals and publishing biographies. She would spend decades in the theatre while maintaining an interest in political movements as well. She became an organizer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where her future husband was a co-founder, serving as the editor of the Crisis Magazine from 1910-1934.
Her politics moved more to the Left resulting in her joining the Communist Party of the U.S. during the 1940s and serving on a high level within its structures and concomitant mass groups and coalitions that were either controlled or influenced by the Marxist-Leninist Party. With the passing of W.E.B. Du Bois’ first wife Nina Gomer in 1950, Graham Du Bois became closer to the retired professor and prodigious author.
Her burgeoning personal relationship with Du Bois moved him further into left-wing circles becoming a consistent ally on the periphery of the CP. Du Bois was a leading member of the Council on African Affairs (CAA) which was founded in the late 1930s by perhaps the leading artist in the U.S., Paul Leroy Robeson, a graduate of Princeton and Columbia University Law School who became an actor, singer and social scientist.
Shirley Graham Du Bois with Malcolm X in Ghana, May 1964
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