Memories of Shirley Graham Du Bois: The Personal & The Political

Note: With this personal reflection on the life and work of Shirley Graham Du Bois, Bettina Aptheker continues the Miami Institute’s forum on Graham Du Bois. 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.” Aptheker remembers Shirley Graham Du Bois “as a woman of formidable energy and charisma, humor and courage.”

My earliest memory of visiting the home of W.E.B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois was when I was about six years old. It was 1952. They lived at 31 Grace Court in Brooklyn Heights, about a block from the East River. It was a tree-lined street. There was a small black iron fence at the entrance. Dominating the living room was a grand piano, its black surface polished to a high sheen.  I was just learning the piano, and my mother encouraged me to play something for these esteemed friends. Dr. Du Bois further encouraged me by sitting alongside me on the piano bench and singing along with whatever melody I managed to slowly play. I remember his kindness, his capacity to hold his breath rather a long time (while I found my note) and a strong tenor voice. Since Dr. Du Bois was always the focus of adult attention, I assumed the piano was his. It was years later that I learned it belonged to Shirley Graham Du Bois, who was an accomplished pianist, opera composer, and a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.

Shirley Graham Du Bois was multi-talented. In addition to her musical career, she was a playwright, and the author of award-winning young adult biographies of prominent Black Americans including Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker, and Frederick Douglass. I knew her as a woman of formidable energy and charisma, humor and courage. Personally, she gifted me with her love, and mentored me, especially in my early teens when I shared some stories I had written with her. She read them and conveyed her ideas with me, always with kindness and patience.

During the Cold War years from the late 1940s through the early 1960s Shirley Graham Du Bois was among the cadre of Black Communist women organizing against racism, fascism and war, and for African liberation. Overshadowed by the prominence of her husband, her historic contributions and blazing presence in the movement had been largely overlooked until Gerald Horne’s biography, Race Woman, appeared  in 2000. This esteemed group of Black women included Claudia Jones, Alice Childress, Eslanda Robeson, Louise Thompson Patterson, Lorraine Hansberry, Elizabeth Catlett and Beaulah Richardson. Many of them wrote for Paul Robeson’s news journal Freedom. They mostly worked in and around the Harlem branch of the U.S. Communist Party.

Among these women’s initiatives was the formation of an organization they called Sojourners for Truth and Justice. Shirley Graham was among the dozen or so women who first met to launch it. Sojourners was founded to protest police and Klan white supremacist violence, especially in the south in the post-World War II period. In their first action over 100 Black women met in a conference in Washington, D.C. between September 29 andOctober 1, 1951, offering direct testimony about the devastating violence visited upon their families and communities.  They also marched into the U.S. Department of Justice, 60-strong, for a meeting with an assistant attorney general, Maceo Hubbard, the only Black member of the Justice Department. They demanded federal protections against the perpetrators, who went unpunished by a thoroughly racist criminal justice system that investigated each incident (if at all) and declared the victim to have died “by hands unknown.” The Sojourners also called for federal protection for Black communities. These demands were not to be realized for more than a decade until the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Sojourners also held a successful conference on the eastern seaboard in March 1952, for which visual artist Elizabeth Catlett provided the graphics. Lorraine Hansberry organized a local chapter in Brooklyn. But the organization did not survive the Cold War repression, forced to disband in 1952. Nevertheless, it was a significant initiative that presaged the movements that were to come only a short while later including the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56, and the first March on Washington for Integration in 1957.

For Shirley Graham Du Bois, who was at the Washington conference, this was only one of the many organizations of which she was a part during these Cold War years. Others included, for example, the Council on African Affairs (CAA) begun in 1937. By the late 1940s it was headed by Dr. Du Bois, and his comrade and colleague Alphaeus Hunton. The CAA focused on political and social concerns across the continent  and provided concrete assistance from Americans to Africans, for example, aiding in the South African people's struggle against apartheid.  Shirley was also active in the Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, seeking to prevent the deportation of Communists some of whom had been convicted under the Smith Act of “conspiring to overthrow the government by force and violence.” The government successfully deported, for example, Claudia Jones with whom Shirley had worked, and the writer V.J. Jerome.  She was also very involved in the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) that sought to defend victims of racist persecutions in the south. For example, the CRC defended Rosa Lee Ingram, a widowed mother of 12 and a Georgia sharecropper. She and two of her sons were accused of the murder of a white neighbor who tried to sexually assault her. This was in 1947. After years of struggle, she and her sons were freed. The CRC also mounted a defense for Willie McGee in Laurel Mississippi accused of raping a white woman in 1951 in a patently conjured case. Despite three trials, that included a United States Supreme Court reprieve after the second one, he was tried a third time, found guilty and, again, sentenced to death. The execution was carried out despite national protests.

Following the horrific lynching of Emmett Till in 1955, Shirley Graham Du Bois proposed to write a book about it for a publisher in Prague, Czechoslovakia to garner international support against the racist violence in the United States. Although this project was not realized, it further illustrates Shirley Graham Du Bois’s activism, in this case using her skills as a writer; she was ever practical and indefatigable.

On the home front Shirley was also Dr. Du Bois’s loving comrade, caretaker, and defender. Seeing them together at their home or ours in Brooklyn, their loving and often hilarious bantering revealed a deep and profound relationship that I only came to more fully understand when I was older. But as a child in their presence, I was simply filled with delight, their laughter contagious. I knew there was something called a Cold War, I knew that Dr. Du Bois had been scandalously arrested as a “foreign agent,” I knew there was a global outcry and that an astonished and embarrassed judge dismissed the charges against him. I knew Shirley was at the center of his defense. Later, in my teen years and as an adult, I was forever amazed at her determination, her perseverance, and the ways in which she found a “way out of no way,” to continue in struggles for social justice.

Then, one afternoon, in my teen years, when we were alone together, Shirley told me about the death of her oldest son Robert. He had died in 1944. Her pain was palpable, and memorable, because it was the first time she shared such deep feelings with me. I had grown up knowing her younger son, David (1925-2005), who had been like a much older brother to me, but I had known nothing about Robert. Shirley told me he died in hospital from pneumonia. He had been in the military, drafted during World War II, and given a medical discharge. By the time he arrived at her home in New York, he was in terrible shape. Shirley felt that a long delay in finally getting him hospitalized and treated, especially after the military neglect, which she attributed to racism, led to his death. He was only 23.

I realize now, as I am reflecting on her life, that however joyful and loving her marriage was to Du Bois, Robert’s death cast a long and irreparable shadow over her life. Part of her strategy for dealing with this grief was to work unceasingly. It was, of course, politically driven, but it was also deeply personal, a payback for all the pain, of all the mothers, whose children had fallen in the mindless whirlwinds of racism.

Shortly after Robert’s death, Shirley enrolled in graduate school at NYU and, by 1947, had very nearly finished her PhD. Her dissertation was a fictionalized account of the life of a muckraking journalist, Anne Royall (1769-1854). Royall had been put on trial in Washington, D.C. as a “common scold,” a charge reserved only for women who were “evil” or deemed a public nuisance. The charges resulted from Royall’s writings against corruption in the Presbyterian church, and her opposition to President Andrew Jackson’s brutal removal of the  Cherokee and Choctaw peoples from their homeland in what became known as the Trail of Tears. Shirley’s dissertation, titled “The Verdict,” focused especially on Royall’s scandalous trial. The violations of the First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and of the press in the persecution of Anne Royall were perhaps part of the reason Shirley wanted to write about her as she watched the increasingly dire attacks on the Left in the Cold War. The dissertation has never been published. I also found it to be among her most explicitly feminist works. Accepted as her dissertation at NYU, she was, however, 9 credits short for receiving her degree. She moved onto other things, among them the young adult biography of Frederick Douglass, There Was Once a Slave, for which she received the Julian Messner Award in 1947, a singular honor.

Among the most traumatic experiences of my childhood was the trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In the mainstream press they were referred to as the “atom bomb spies,” who gave the Soviet Union the “secret” of how to make an atomic bomb. In fact, they were accused of conspiracy to do this. Conspiracy is a notoriously amorphous charge, and the evidence for it is largely circumstantial, but in the Cold War anti-Soviet and anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s the Rosenbergs were convicted. All legal appeals failed, and even an appeal for clemency from the Pope did not move President Dwight David Eisenhower. The Rosenbergs were executed on Friday June 19, 1953, at Sing Sing prison in New York.The following Christmas, Shirley and Dr. Du Bois held a Christmas party at their home for the Rosenbergs’ orphaned sons: Michael, who was 11, and Robby who was 9. I was there with my parents.  Scores of people filled their Grace Court home that December, the living room festooned with lights and a giant tree, fragrant with pine, and glittering with ornaments, under which were colorfully wrapped presents. There was plentiful food and drink. The composer and song writer Lewis Allen played the piano and sang, everyone joining in with the familiar tunes of the season. Lewis Allen was the public name for Abel Meeropol. He and his wife Anne had adopted Michael and Robby. As hostess, Shirley managed the party; the work to put it together must have taken her weeks. No amount of festivity, however, could assuage the collective grief, or relieve the sons of their traumatic loss.

***

I was to correspond with Shirley over many years as an adult; I especially sought her help in gathering support for Angela Davis while she was imprisoned in the early 1970s. Shirley was then living in Cairo, with her son David. I was a little worried about how she might respond to this request for help because I knew that she had endorsed Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, both of which the U.S. Communist Party had opposed. And I knew Shirley’s support came out of her experiences in China, and meeting Mao, with Dr. Du Bois in the late 1950s. They were both profoundly affected by what they perceived then to be the extraordinary success of the revolution, especially in eliminating famine as Dr. Du Bois told me.

By October 1970 following Angela’s arrest, I was deeply involved in her defense, and when I wrote to Shirley it was to ask for help in gathering support from African women. I need not have worried about her solidarity. She responded swiftly and affirmatively to my appeal, gathering the signatures of many prominent African women calling for Angela’s freedom.

I last heard Shirley speak in the mid-1970s when she returned to the United States initially under the auspices of the Black Scholar. She spoke in multiple venues across the country. I attended a San Francisco Bay Area talk that focused on the struggles for African liberation. She was by then, deep into her 70s, still vigorous, and invigorating. 

And for me always a loving presence.

I last saw her in my parents’ home in Brooklyn. She was already quite ill with the cancer that was to take her life. She was seated on the couch in the living room, my mother next to her, and my father in his favorite chair opposite her. I was seated on another chair to her right. The memory is vivid, and especially the passion with which she spoke about her love for “my husband.”  She had known Dr. Du Bois for almost her whole life. While still a girl he had visited her family home, a guest of her father, the Reverend David A. Graham. While studying at Oberlin and later working and writing, she had written to him many times seeking his counsel and advice. They had become lovers in 1938 when she was 42 and he was 70.

Of his dying hours in Accra, Ghana, Shirley Graham Du Bois wrote:

My husband greeted me with a smile when I returned to his room. ‘Now,’ he said, patting his bed, ‘sit here beside me. Rest your little self. Don’t bother about supper or anything else. Just stay here with me.’

I sat close to him and took his hand in mine. He closed his eyes, smiled contentedly and murmured something I did not quite catch, but I heard my name. Then he fell asleep. . . My dear one never awoke”

—Shirley Graham Du Bois, His Day Is Marching On: A Memoir of W.E.B. Du Bois (Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott, 1971), 367).

Among Shirley Graham’s closest friends was the great poet, Sonia Sanchez. Decades older, Shirley Graham was a mentor to Sanchez, and their bond was a place of refuge for them both. Upon her death Sanchez wrote a poem of mourning and tribute, “Kwa mama zetu waliotuzaa,” (for our mothers who gave us birth). The poem sings in part:

restring her eyes for me

restring her body for me

restring her peace for me

no longer full of pain, may she walk

bright with orange smiles, may she walk

as it was long ago, may she walk

abundant with lightning steps, may she walk

abundant with green trails, may she walk

abundant with rainbows, may she walk.

—Sonia Sanchez, I’ve Been A Woman, New and Selected Poems (Chicago, IL: Third World Press, 1990), 99-101.

 -Bettina Aptheker

Bettina Aptheker is Distinguished Professor Emerita, Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). A scholar-activist Bettina co-led both the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley 1964-65, and the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis (1970-1972). Bettina began teaching in the Women’s Studies program at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1981 and helped to build it into one of the leading Feminist Studies departments in the country. In 2019 Bettina launched an online course, Feminism & Social Justice. As of now over 127,000 people have taken the course across the globe. Bettina’s two most recent books are Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech & Became a Feminist Rebel (2006).  Communists in Closets: Queering the History, 1930s-1990(2023).

References

Bettina Aptheker, “Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965), Freedom in Mind,” in Bettina Aptheker, Communists in Closets: Queering the History, 1930s-1990s, New York: Routledge, 2023, pp. 171-211.

Shirley Graham Du Bois, His Day Is Marching On: A Memoir of W.E.B. Du Bois, Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott, 1971

Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois, New York: New York University Press, 2000

Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011

Sonia Sanchez, I’ve Been A Woman, New and Selected Poems. Chicago, IL, Third World Press, 1978, 1985, 1990. Pp.99-101.