Roses, Lorraine Elena, and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph.
Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies
of 100 Black Women Writers, 1900–1945.Boston: G.
K. Hall & Co., 1990.
Graham DuBois, Shirley Lola (1906–1977)
A talented musician, biographer, and prolific play-
wright who composed and produced the first major
opera to feature an African-American cast. Gra-
ham was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Etta Bell
Graham and David Graham, an African Methodist
Episcopal minister and active NATIONALASSOCI-
ATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED
PEOPLE (NAACP) leader. She was educated in
Paris and returned to the United States to begin a
teaching career and to continue her schooling. In
1923 she married Shadrack McCanns (also spelled
McCants), a newspaper editor in Seattle, and the
couple had two children before McCann’s death
three years later.
Graham renewed her acquaintance with
W. E. B. DUBOISin 1936, almost 15 years after the
ATLANTAUNIVERSITYscholar and CRISISeditor
had lodged overnight with her family in Colorado.
During the decades leading up to their marriage
in 1951, Graham benefited from DuBois’s sup-
port for her career. He published her writing in
The Crisis and wrote strong letters of support
that contributed to her winning prestigious fel-
lowships such as the JULIUSROSENWALD FEL-
LOWSHIP. It was Graham who, following DuBois’s
forced retirement from ATLANTAUNIVERSITY,
arranged for him to relocate to 409 Edgecombe
Avenue in HARLEM’s prestigious SUGAR HILL
district. In 1951, after an impressive and long-
standing career as a writer, teacher, and play-
wright, she married the recently widowed W. E. B.
DuBois on St. Valentine’s Day in 1951. The cou-
ple lived in Brooklyn, New York, until they immi-
grated to GHANAin 1961.
Graham completed a master’s thesis entitled
“Survivals of Africanism in Modern Music.” Before
pursuing undergraduate and master’s level degrees
in music at Oberlin College, however, Graham
studied for one year at the Howard School of Music
in WASHINGTON, D.C. In 1929 she joined the fac-
ulty at Morgan State College, where she taught
music until 1932. As a sophomore at Oberlin, she
distinguished herself by completing TOM-TOM, a
one-act play that was developed further and fash-
ioned into the 1932 opera Tom-Tom: An Epic of
Music and the Negro.The work was the first major
opera written and produced by a woman. It was
produced in several formats, including an NBC
radio broadcast of an abridged form of the play. The
piece was performed in its entirety at the Cleveland
Stadium in late June and early July 1932.
Graham was part of the Works Project Admin-
istration cultural effort. In 1936 she moved to
CHICAGO, joined the Federal Writers’ Project, and
managed the Prince Theatre, where she worked
with African-American casts. Among the works
that she adapted for them to perform were The
Mikadoand Little Black Sambo.She became a Julius
Rosenwald fellow and became affiliated with the
Yale University School of Drama in 1938. The pres-
tigious grant enabled Graham to be in residence
until 1940. During this two-year period, she com-
pleted several plays that revealed the breadth of her
talents. In quick succession, she produced the musi-
cal Deep Rivers(1939), the tragic drama It’s Morning
(1940), a popular radio script, Track Thirteen(1940),
and the three-act tragedies ELISHA’SRAVEN(1941)
and Dust to Earth(1941).
Graham’s career intensified as the Harlem
Renaissance came to a close. She was a GUGGEN-
HEIMFELLOWSHIPwinner from 1945 to 1947. She
began writing biographies of famous African
Americans shortly thereafter. In 1946 her biogra-
phy Paul Robeson: Citizen of the Worldearned the
Julian Messner Award, and the forthcoming work,
There Once Was a Slave: The Heroic Story of Freder-
ick Douglass,based on the antebellum abolitionist
and orator, would also win the Messner Award.
Other works included biographies of Phillis
Wheatley, Pocahontas, Jean Baptiste Pointe de
Sable, and Benjamin Banneker. Graham published
steadily throughout the 1940s and in 1950 was
honored by the National Institute of Arts and Let-
ters for her works.
Her political activities also increased; in 1943
she was appointed to the position of field secretary
for the NAACP. Her political work facilitated her
renewed acquaintance with W. E. B. DuBois,
whom she had met first while a teenager in Col-
orado Springs and again in the 1930s during her
tenure at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial192 Graham DuBois, Shirley Lola