Shirley Lola Graham Du Bois was an Americanwriter and composer. She is also remembered and admired for her commitment to the racial uplift of all peoples of color as well as African-Americans.
Background
Shirley Lola Graham Du Bois was born on November 11, 1904, in Indianapolis, Indiana.
She was one of five children born to David A. Graham, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal church, teacher, and the organizer of a local NAACP chapter, and Etta Bell.
Education
The family moved frequently; Shirley attended schools in Detroit, Chicago, Nashville, and Colorado Springs, before graduating from Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane, Washington. When Graham was thirteen years old, W. E. B. Du Bois came to Colorado Springs to deliver a speech; his stay with her family made a lasting impression on the young teenager. Influenced by his words, she wrote an article during her first year of high school that criticized the YWCA for refusing to accept her in a swimming class because of her race.
From 1927 to 1928, McCanns attended the Howard School of Music in Washington. In 1932 she enrolled in Oberlin College, from which she received a bachelor's degree in 1934 and a master's degree in 1935. McCanns studied piano, pipe organ, and voice, as well as music history; her master's thesis was entitled "Survivals of Africanism in Modern Music. "
Career
While at Oberlin Shirley McCanns produced a musical, Tom-Tom, depicting the history of African Americans from the days of slavery through the Harlem Renaissance. An abridged version of her play was broadcast by NBC radio on June 26, 1932; and the complete version was performed at the Cleveland Stadium from June 29 to July 6, 1932.
In 1935, McCanns returned to teaching at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State college (now Tennessee State University) in Nashville, where she served as chair of the Fine Arts Department. That year she renewed her acquaintance with Du Bois when he invited her to attend a teachers' conference with him in Lexington, Kentucky.
In 1936, McCanns again gave up her teaching career, this time to work at the Federal Theater in Chicago as the supervisor of the African-American division. There she adapted such well-known works as The Hairy Ape, The Mikado, and Little Black Sambo for a black cast.
From 1938 to 1940, McCanns held a Julius Rosenwald Grant; during that time, she spent a year at the Yale School of Drama where she revised Tom-Tom. She also wrote and saw a number of plays produced, including Dust to Earth, I Gotta Home, Elijah's Ravens, Deep Rivers, It's Mornin', and Track Thirteen. In 1941 she saw her play Mississippi Rainbow produced in Indianapolis.
The years during World War II were hectic and varied for McCanns. She worked for the USO in Arizona, then moved to New York City, where she wrote political articles and won another Rosenwald grant. In 1943 she became a field secretary for the NAACP. From 1945 to 1947, McCanns held a Guggenheim Fellowship and attended classes at New York University.
Interest in politics brought her once again into close contact with W. E. B. Du Bois, who returned to work for the NAACP after being forced to retire from Atlanta University at the age of seventy-five because of his radical political views. They married in 1951 and bought a house in Brooklyn from playwright Arthur Miller and resided there until they left the United States for Ghana in 1961. Du Bois died in Ghana in 1963, and Shirley remained there until 1967, after which she resided in Cairo, Egypt.
In 1971 she published His Day Is Marching On, and in 1976 A Pictorial History of W. E. B. Du Bois, both tributes to her husband. Du Bois was not allowed to return to the United States until 1971, because the State Department felt her Communist ties to be a security threat. She died in Beijing, China, where she had gone for cancer treatment.
After 1950, McCanns became increasingly interested and involved in politics, espousing Communist doctrines. She was alarmed at the conservative trend of American politics and the hysteria of the McCarthy era.
Personality
As is often the case with the wives of famous men, Shirley Du Bois was largely identified by the public as the wife of W. E. B. Du Bois, even though by the time she married him, she had produced numerous critically acclaimed musicals, plays, and biographies.
Connections
Graham married Shadrack T. McCanns in 1923; they had two children before his death in 1926. Later she married W. E. B. Du Bois on February 14, 1951.