The Historical Imagination of Shirley Graham Du Bois
Note: Co-editor of the forthcoming collection of essays published by the University of Pennsylvania Press—Shirley Graham Du Bois: Artist, Activist, and Author in the African Diaspora (2025)—Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel continues the Miami Institute’s forum on Graham Du Bois. Joseph-Gabriel argues that we should consider situating “Graham Du Bois as a precursor in this intellectual genealogy of theorizing nonlinear ways of understanding history…Consequently, the vision of Black liberation that emerges across Graham Du Bois’s writings engages with time in the speculative mode by privileging possibility over the certainty and ordering impulse of chronology.” This forum, curated by Philip Luke Sinitiere and Tionne Alliyah Parris, is part of the Miami Institute’s series of forums on “Learning from Their Lived Experiences during the Cold War.”
On July 28, 1962, Shirley Graham Du Bois wrote a letter to the first president of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. Sitting at her husband’s bedside in a private wing of the University College Hospital in London, she recounted the harrowing surgery that 94-year-old W.E.B. Du Bois had just undergone. The surgeon had gravely informed her that the next few days were crucial and would determine whether her husband was to survive: “If you [Shirley Graham Du Bois] can pull him through the next week he’ll be all right.”[1] On doctor’s orders, Graham Du Bois kept “the radio and television on in his room as an aid to drawing him back to life.”[2] But for days, W.E.B. remained lethargic and indifferent to the world around him until he heard news of another near-death: an assassination attempt on Nkrumah. The president had narrowly escaped a bomb attack in the northern Ghanaian town of Kulungugu.[3] Nkrumah spent the days following the explosion in a hospital where doctors removed shrapnel from his back. The news of the Kulungugu bomb attack had a discernible effect on Dr. Du Bois. Recuperating from his own “bloody operation,” the unresponsive Du Bois, who had sunk “into a kind of coma and refused to try to swallow food,”[4] now roused himself each morning to inquire anxiously of his wife, “any news of the President?”[5]
As the lives of two of the world’s most prominent Pan-Africanists seemed to hang in the balance, Shirley Graham Du Bois reflected somberly on the chilling effect Nkrumah’s death would have on anti-imperialist and world peace movements. She wrote to him from the hospital and again in an essay that fall for the journal she edited, Freedomways:
The loss of President Nkrumah would be a tragic loss to the world. It would grind to a halt progress in relations between nations and races; it would turn the World Peace Movement back upon itself and it would change the winds now sweeping over so much of the earth into blind and raging fires—without direction. But Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah cannot be lost to Ghanaians—he cannot be lost to Africa. He lives in the soul of the land, in the heart and mind of the nation. The vision for all Africa which he has emblazoned across the skies is a living Spirit which will continue to lead and inspire the people.[6]
Contemplating the intertwined survival of W.E.B. Du Bois, Nkrumah, and the World Peace Movement as Graham Du Bois did in 1962 with anticolonial movements sweeping across Africa and the Caribbean meant thinking about the urgency of Black liberation. Her writings in that Cold War period contained more than updates about her husband’s health or concerns for Nkrumah’s safety. They also carried echoes of a fundamental question about Black freedom that Graham Du Bois herself had posed a year earlier in the second issue of Freedomways: “Progress which way?”[7]
The query was as political as it was historical.
Graham Du Bois wrote her letters to Nkrumah in a period when Africa was making history. That history would be anything but linear. It was a time of anticipation and uncertainty; the colonial past was not yet past, nor had the imagined sovereign future of the African continent materialized. Promising a political future that would supposedly both restore freedoms interrupted by colonialism and secure a place in the modern world, African decolonization spilled in multiple directions beyond the temporal bounds of the independence period of the 1960s.
Nearly three decades after Graham Du Bois’s correspondence with Nkrumah, her mentee, Bettina Aptheker—who has written her own essay on Graham Du Bois for this Miami Institute forum--would articulate her own practice, as a historian, of working to “pivot the center.” As Elsa Barkley Brown explains, Aptheker’s “nonlinear, polyrhythmic way of understanding history” allowed her to constantly shift the focus of historical inquiry to center ignored subjects without rendering others marginal.[8] Rather than reversing the roles of center and margin, the pivot creates multiple, ever-shifting centers and varying understandings of temporal progress. We might situate Graham Du Bois as a precursor in this intellectual genealogy of theorizing nonlinear ways of understanding history. In her letter to Nkrumah, Graham Du Bois suggested that the temporally linear notion of progress was, in reality, fickle and shape shifting winds that could easily be transformed into directionless “raging fires.” She does not disavow progress, but her letter does complicate it, for ultimately, the vision for African liberation that she saw “emblazoned across the skies” was not an easily demarcated transition from one historical event to the next. It was an always ongoing practice, a “living Spirit” and a collective consciousness.
Consequently, the vision of Black liberation that emerges across Graham Du Bois’s writings engages with time in the speculative mode by privileging possibility over the certainty and ordering impulse of chronology. When Graham Du Bois wrote about the Ghanaian president’s possible death, both in her Freedomways article and again in her letter to a still-alive Nkrumah, she engaged in speculative history. She understood that Africa was standing on the cusp of significant political transformation at a crucial Cold War moment. She understood too, that that process was not simply a matter of marching valiantly forward into the future, but rather would entail following the tortured, winding path of a movement turning “back upon itself.” In her letter, she returns again and again to the conditional tense, “would” as her account of Nkrumah’s hypothetical death conveys the possibility of loss, “halt[ed] progress” and the unbearable destruction of freedom dreams. Graham Du Bois’ text was written first as part of an essay for the primarily American readership of Freedomways then reproduced in a letter to Nkrumah while the manuscript of the original essay was en route to the Freedomways editorial office from Ghana to New York City for publication. In this way, Graham Du Bois’s text bends back on itself, following its own convoluted itinerary as she reflects on the multiple intertwined nows of her political moment.[9] Throughout her writings, Graham Du Bois tried to make sense of her present by imagining alternate pasts and futures. Her texts were works of speculative history that locate Black liberation across pasts, presents, and futures, and solidly in the realm of the possible.
One example of Graham Du Bois’s speculative history is her Freedomways article, “Negroes in the American Revolution.” In its narration of the important role that Black people played in the United States’ revolutionary war, the article begins at a beginning that is no more: “Beginning in 1771 and for two decades thereafter, the Fifth of March was commemorated as Independence Day in America.”[10] In so doing, Graham Du Bois disrupts the putative fixity of America’s historical and ideological origins.[11] To return to an alternate past in which the United States marks its independence on March 5 rather than July 4, as Graham Du Bois does, is to explore the possibilities that the past held, for imagining Black citizenship as central to the project of American freedom. In this founding myth in flux, 1771 is the spatiotemporal location of a freedom that could have been and might yet come to be. It is one of many moments of possibility. She offers 1783 as another of these alternate beginnings, a pivotal period in which national consciousness came to cohere around the signing of the Declaration of Independence, relegating the Boston Massacre to a mere “street brawl” no longer worthy of enshrinement as the nation’s founding event.[12]
Because Graham Du Bois was primarily concerned with the production of historical narratives, in other words with how we remember, her return to these symbolic historical events sought to imbue them with new meaning in her Cold War present. In the temporal moves that she makes in “Negroes in the American Revolution,” Graham Du Bois imagines an alternate present that is the future of a hypothetical past in which African Americans’ civil rights were central to the nation’s founding principles. Her return to the U.S. Revolution, against the current of Black thinkers’ turn to Reconstruction as that fleeting moment of possibility, shows that it is not only the project of Black citizenship in America that is unfinished. The United States itself remains an unfinished project.
When Shirley Graham Du Bois wrote to Kwame Nkrumah from the University College Hospital in London in 1962, her husband was in a coma, suspended between life and death. He died a year later. By 1966 Nkrumah had been overthrown. In the tumultuous years to come, Graham Du Bois would reach again and again for the imaginative political possibilities that alternate histories offered. She examined different historical examples of collective Black activism for their liberatory possibilities that could be brought to bear on the now. For example, she began her “Middle East Report” published in The Black Scholar in 1974, with a thought-provoking question about the passage of time and imminent futures: “Now that the earth has turned on its axis and the balance of power has shifted, what is our role?”[13] Spatiotemporal interrogations such as “Progress, which way?” and “Where to from here?” punctuated her writings about historical and contemporary events.[14] Shirley Graham Du Bois troubled time in her imaginings of Black revolutions fictional and factual. Her writings invite us to consider still the myriad possibilities offered by freedom in the speculative mode.
-Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel
Annette Joseph-Gabriel is the John Spencer Bassett Associate Professor of Romance Studies and Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. Her research focuses on race, gender, and citizenship in the French-speaking Caribbean, Africa, and France. She is the author of Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire (2020) and co-editor of Shirley Graham Du Bois: Artist, Activist, and Author in the African Diaspora (forthcoming 2025).
Endnotes:
[1] Shirley Graham Du Bois, “Letter to Osagyefo,” 28 July 1962, 1. Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD), Accra, Ghana.
[2] Graham Du Bois, “Letter to Osagyefo,” 8 Aug. 1962, 1. PRAAD.
[3] See Jeffrey S. Ahlman, Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana (Ohio University Press, 2017) and Matteo Grilli, Nkrumaism and African Nationalism: Ghana’s Pan-African Foreign Policy in the Age of Decolonization (Springer, 2018).
[4] Graham Du Bois, “Letter to Osagyefo,” 28 July 1962, 1.
[5] Graham Du Bois, “Letter to Osagyefo,” 8 Aug. 1962, 1.
[6] Shirley Graham, “Nation Building in Ghana,” Freedomways vol. 2.4, Fall 1962, 376. See also Graham Du Bois, “Letter to Osagyefo,” 8 Aug. 1962, 3. PRAAD.
[7] Shirley Graham, “Negroes in the American Revolution,” Freedomways vol. 2.2, Summer 1961, 125-135.
[8] Elsa Barkley Brown, “African-American Women’s Quilting,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 921. See also Bettina Aptheker, Tapestries of Life: Women’s Work, Women’s Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 11-12, 20.
[9] Graham Du Bois, “Letter to Osagyefo,” 8 Aug. 1962, 2-3.
[10] Graham Du Bois, “Negroes in the American Revolution,” 125.
[11] A similar disruption has allowed contemporary historians to dislodge “the 1776 revolt against British rule” as a singular founding moment replete with the promise of freedom for all, and to situate it instead in a longer history of revolutions and counter-revolutions in the Americas. See Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution Of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York: New York University Press, 2014), vii.
[12] Graham Du Bois, “Negroes in the American Revolution,” 133.
[13] Shirley Graham Du Bois, “Where to from Here?,” The Black Scholar, 5/6 (1974): 40–43.
[14] See Shirley Graham, “Negroes in the American Revolution,” and Shirley Graham Du Bois, “Where to from Here?”
