Basic Facts
Born: November 11, 1896, Indianapolis, Indiana
Died: March 27, 1977, Beijing, China
Type of Performer: Composer, author, playwright, activist
Genre: Classical
Awards/Notable Achievements:
- First African-American woman to compose an opera
- Composed and produced the first all-black opera, "Tom Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro"
About Shirley Graham Du Bois
Du Bois grew up in Indianapolis, the daughter of a minister and a leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Her childhood was characterized by constant moves, making it difficult for her to succeed in school. She nevertheless graduated from high school in 1915. Several years later, after marrying and divorcing her first husband, she started work as a music librarian at Howard while studying music there. She also studied at New York's Institute of Musical Arts and at the Sorbonne in Paris. She attended Oberlin College from 1931-1934 for music; she earned her Master's in music from the same school in 1935. She considered plays to be important spaces for social activism, and her first opera, "Tom Tom," premiered while she was a student at Oberlin in 1932. After Oberlin, she was appointed as director of the Chicago Federal Theater. With her brother Bill, she founded the Graham Artists Bureau in Chicago to help African American artists find bookings, and in 1941 she began working with the United Services Organization (USO) as entertainment director for Black troops at Fort Huachuca in Arizona.
In 1943, she took a position as field secretary with the NAACP, a move spurred in part by her relationship with famed author and civil rights activist W.E.B Du Bois. After they married in 1951, the couple spent the rest of their lives as human rights advocates. They moved to Ghana in 1961 at the invitation of President Kwame Nkrumah; they were frustrated by the lack of progress on civil rights in the United States and hounded by the federal government after the House Un-American Activities Committee indicted W. E. B. Du Bois for his alleged associations with communist groups (he was acquitted for lack of evidence). Her husband died in 1963, but Shirley Graham Du Bois stayed in Ghana until a coup in 1966 overthrew the government. She moved with her son to Cairo, Egypt, where she continued to advocate for underrepresented groups. She died in 1977 in Beijing, where she was seeking treatment for breast cancer.
Important Pieces
"Tom Tom", opera, 1932*
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