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Du Bois, Shirley Graham
4 articles on Du Bois, Shirley Graham
Du Bois, Shirley Graham
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 626 Includes: Bibliography1896?–1977
African American author, musical director, composer, playwright, and political activist; second wife of the prominent black scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois. Shirley Graham Du Bois was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, the oldest of David A. Graham and Etta (Bell) Graham's five children. Growing up, she moved with her family to various locations throughout the United States. As a teenager in Colorado Springs, Colorado, she first met W. E. B. Du Bois when he came to lecture at the local African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). Soon after high school, she married a local man, Shadrack T. McCanns. The marriage soon ended, leaving her with two small children to support. “In quick succession I knew the glory of motherhood and the pain of deep sorrow,” she wrote later. “For the years immediately following, everything I ...
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Source: Black Women in America, Second Edition
Word Count: 1149 Includes: Bibliography(b. 11 November 1896 ; d. 27 March 1977 ),
writer, composer, conductor, playwright, and director. When Shirley Graham wrote in a 1933 Crisis essay, “Black man's music has become America's music. It will not die,” she summed up one of her life's ambitions: to bring to the foreground the many accomplishments of African Americans in every field. One of Graham's concerns was that African Americans would eventually abandon their spirituals, with their unique rhythms and haunting melodies. In an effort to preserve black music, she became the first African American woman to write and produce an all-black opera, Tom-Toms: An Epic of Music and the Negro ( 1932 ). This was just one successful effort in a lifetime ...
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Source: American National Biography Online
Word Count: 1958 Includes: Bibliographymusical composer and director, author, and political activist, also known as Shirley Graham Du Bois, was born Lola Bell Graham in Indianapolis, Indiana, the daughter of the Reverend David A. Graham, an African Methodist Episcopal minister, and Etta Bell. She accompanied them when her father held pastorates in New Orleans, Colorado Springs, and Spokane. He delighted her with stories about important blacks in American history. In his churches, she learned to play the piano and the pipe organ and to conduct choirs. In 1914 she graduated from high school in Spokane, took business school courses, and worked in government offices in ...
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Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 1064(1896–1977), author, political activist, musical director, composer, and multitalented recipient of the National Academy of Arts and Letters Award for contributions to American literature. Shirley Lola Graham, the only daughter of Etta Bell Graham and Reverend David A. Graham, was born on 11 November 1896 in Indianapolis, Indiana, the oldest of five children. Free-spirited, talented, and ambitious, Graham resisted the shackles of race and gender. She divorced her first husband, worked to support two sons, and established a career for herself at a time when women had only recently gained the right to vote.In 1926,Graham studied music and French at the Sorbonnne. Although her tenure there predates the Negritude movement, her musical training was enriched by interaction with African and Afro-Caribbean students in Paris. In ...
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