Shirley Graham Du Bois and Cold War Connectivity in the Struggle for Black Liberation

Note: Written by Tionne Alliyah Parris, the essay below launches the forum on Shirley Graham Du Bois. This forum on Graham Du Bois, curated by Tionne Alliyah Parris and Phil Sinitiere, is part of the Miami Institute’s series of forums on “Learning from Their Lived Experiences during the Cold War.”

Shirley Graham Du Bois is often referred to, mainly, as the wife of Black intellectual W.E.B Du Bois, yet this title is limiting, and she has thus often been overlooked as a notable contributor to the transnational struggle for Black liberation that spanned the twentieth century. Gerald Horne’s biography Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (2000) has given significant insight into the totality of her life and importantly highlights her progressive activism after the death of W.E.B. Du Bois in 1963. The couple had been able to travel extensively in their final years together, and these trips impacted her development significantly as a political activist. Alongside her husband, she had witnessed the rise of revolutionary new societies in China and the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Yet Graham Du Bois also had experiences independent of her husband, for example, her close friendship with Claudia Jones – who was simultaneously leading efforts in Britain to unite Black and brown migrants towards liberation.[i] While the Cold War was an increasing concern for the government of the United States, and the general public across the country, Black radicals seized the time to surreptitiously build anti-capitalist, anti-colonial and anti-racist alliances. More specifically, Shirley Graham Du Bois continued to influence the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements in the United States, from both new locations and new perspectives in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the early 1960s, Shirley Graham Du Bois wrote frequently in support of the Civil Rights Movement within the United States from afar while she and W.E.B Du Bois lived primarily in Ghana. Newspaper writings published in the U.S., for example, showed her support of sit-in campaigns in Greensboro, North Carolina as early as 1960. Aware of the disconnect between the elder generation of Black/Red activists, and the bourgeoning youngsters of the Civil Rights struggle, she wrote: ‘They are risking their education, their futures, their very lives. WHAT WILL WE DO?’[ii] She also went further and advocated increased militancy from Black women in particular: ‘Come on, Negro women! Step forth my Delta sisters! Miss that next card party and join the picket lines!’[iii] Graham Du Bois herself practised what she preached, and in that same month joined a sit-in in New York on March 12th, 1960, alongside a previous Harlem CPUSA affiliate, Adam Clayton Powell Jnr. Yet, while she participated in these more peaceful methods of protest, she wrote for outlets like Freedomways asking readers: ‘just how long does liberation take?’[iv] Through the retelling of the stories of ‘Negroes in the American revolution’, Graham Du Bois’ article highlighted that by taking up arms, African Americans had historically fought valiantly for freedom. As the increasingly violent retaliation against Civil Rights protestors became part of the daily news cycle in the United States, Black radical women like Graham Du Bois hinted that perhaps more militant dissent would be necessary to reach Black liberation. 

Following the death of her husband in August 1963, Shirley Graham Du Bois was heartbroken but, in some ways, liberated. She was free to carve out her own space as an individual, with her own political concerns, although she was bolstered by her husband’s spirit. Gerald Horne posits that after W.E.B. Du Bois’s death, ‘the rapid resumption of work seemed to be therapeutic for her’, and she quickly positioned herself as a ‘confidante and leading advisor to [Kwame] Nkrumah’, the President of Ghana.[v]  Over the previous two decades, Graham Du Bois had rooted herself within a network of radical women that included Claudia Jones, Eslanda Robeson and Louise Thompson Patterson as key contributors, and they had all rallied behind groups like the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, the Civil Rights Congress, and publications like Freedom – spearheaded by Paul Robeson and Louis Burnham. However, her radicalism had not been dulled by the self-imposed exile from the United States, and she worked to re-establish a base of U.S. Black radicals in Ghana. Horne notes that ‘writer Julian Mayfield—also in exile in Accra—called her a true “socialist and a revolutionary,” which in those days in that place was high praise indeed.’[vi] From Accra, she also crucially connected the Civil Rights Movement to the broader anti-colonial struggles taking place across Africa. In 1964, Shirley Graham Du Bois hosted Malcolm X on his tour of Ghana. It was one of many stops on his spree of international travel that year, which included visits through Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. On meeting Shirley Graham Du Bois for the first time, Malcolm X lauded her as ‘one of the most intelligent women I’ve ever met.’[vii]  Gerald Horne adds that her character alone ‘may have swayed’ X’s own view of gender and women’s role within revolutionary movements.’[viii]

Beyond the coup d’etat that saw Nkrumah turfed out of Ghana, and Graham Du Bois subsequently untethered, she chose to keep travelling across Africa and consistently reinforced her own activism in service of Black liberation. Surviving letters in her archive suggest that a friendship had formed between Graham Du Bois and Robert F. Williams of the Revolutionary Action Movement, and she wrote to him from Tanzania in 1967 with optimism that they would meet in person soon after:

I am hoping that I’ll be seeing you within the next few months […] I am confident of the many lessons I can learn there for our struggle here and I am as anxious to get all the information, inspiration, and wisdom I can absorb.[ix]

This showed that Shirley Graham Du Bois purposefully collected information to pass along to Williams, and in doing so she actively weaved herself back into the fabric of Black radical protest as it reconstituted in America. In that same year, she also acted as a conduit between two more activists of the 1960s generation. Graham Du Bois was photographed standing alongside Stokely Carmichael and Kwame Nkrumah in Guinea, West Africa, and this picture remains a tangible reminder of her work as a connective tissue between those who advocated for Black Power across the globe.

With her previous interventions in mind, when Black Power emerged in earnest, it is no surprise that Shirley Graham Du Bois again worked diligently to build inroads amongst young activists. Although she was still under surveillance by the FBI, and after many years travelling nomadically across Africa post-Nkrumah, Shirley Graham returned to the United States to give talks at universities across the country. In her speeches, Graham Du Bois emphasised the importance of the Black women she observed in the audience, saying ‘I must not overlook the ladies.’[x] Like other women in her network, she had always underscored the centrality of Black women as a vanguard in revolution. By 1970, much had changed on the global landscape, but in the United States Black women were still struggling to reach true equality. Du Bois repeated this sentiment at a Yale University conference in the same year, where she told Black women in the audience that their counterparts in Africa, North Vietnam, or China were sadly ‘more liberated than you are.’[xi]  The BPP attempted to address this as women like Ericka Huggins and Elaine Brown did rise to important leadership positions in the early 1970s, and as Black radical women in the Cold War period, Elaine Brown and Shirley Graham Du Bois were destined to come into contact. Horne states that together they nurtured a supportive relationship which led Du Bois to call Brown, ‘not sister, but daughter’ at the height of their comradeship in the 1970s.[xii] While Graham Du Bois’s generation of Black radical women was slowly fading into memory, she again kept reinstating herself as a key interlocutor amongst the young.

Finally, thanks to her proximity to the Black Power Movement, Shirley Graham Du Bois was in a prime position to respond to the Angela Davis campaign in 1970. Many elder Black radicals, like Louise Thompson Patterson and Henry Winston, returned to form despite years on the sidelines of radical protest, and Shirley Graham Du Bois was no exception within the surviving network. From Cairo, Egypt, Shirley Graham Du Bois mobilised the contacts she gained from over a decade of travel. She wrote letters calling for financial assistance to support the Angela Davis defence campaign. An exceptional detail of Du Bois’s work in this region is that she utilised her connections to international women’s campaigners. Affixed to a letter written by Du Bois, she included a list of signatories from the Women’s International Democratic Federation, the Sudanese Women’s Federation, members of Egyptian Parliament and ‘two dozen other women in the United Arab Republic who are journalists, teachers, artists and members of various citizens organizations and committees.’[xiii] In her own words, Du Bois supported their statement, and wrote that:

We, women far distant from the United States, yet well aware of the fate which threatens the brilliant and courageous young scholar, Angela Davis, would add our voices to the swelling chorus of freedom-loving peoples throughout the world, who demand the release of our persecuted Black Sister.[xiv]

The cross-pollination of Graham Du Bois’s influence led to letters pouring in from all over the world, and the campaign archive is filled with letters of support from Spain to the Soviet Union, Venezuela, Japan, and many other countries in between. Although she alone cannot be credited for Davis’s eventual acquittal, her role as an ally, rich in hard-won transnational connections, certainly had an undeniable impact.

The life and work of Shirley Graham Du Bois can alternatively be defined by her lasting strategy of connectivity. As well as being linked to the eminent W.E.B Du Bois, beyond his influence she embedded herself amongst activist communities throughout the Cold War world. Her impact through the Civil Rights and Black Power eras has been somewhat overlooked, and this is symptomatic of a broader failure to recognise the interpersonal, behind-the-scenes work that was undertaken by a whole network of militant Black women activists throughout the twentieth century. As this piece briefly shows, Shirley Graham Du Bois was one of many who laboured in a collective and worked tirelessly to liberate Black people, and ‘all oppressed people’, across the world.

-Tionne Alliyah Parris

Tionne Alliyah Parris is a UK-based historian, specialising in 20th century Black radical history. Her PhD research focuses on Black radical women and the intergenerational impact of their activism on the emergence of the Black Power Movement, in both the United States and in Britain.

Parris’s most recent publications include editing two collections of the work of Professor Gerald Horne: I Dare Say – A Gerald Horne Reader (OR Books, 2024), and African Americans and a New History of the USA (International Publishers, 2025). Additionally, she has solo-authored multiple pieces in various outlets, including a groundbreaking article titled ‘Claudia Jones and Black Power: A Close Reading of the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News’ (2024) in the American Communist History journal. She is also the first winner of the Bloomsbury Academic Writing Fellowship launched in 2024, and the recipient of 2024’s Olivette Otele Prize hosted by the Institute of Historical Research.

Endnotes:

[i] More detail about the work of Claudia Jones in 1960s Britain, as it relates to Black Power, can be gleaned from  Tionne Alliyah Parris, Claudia Jones and Black Power: A Close Reading of the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News, American Communist History, May 2024, <https://doi.org/10.1080/14743892.2023.2267946>

[ii] Shirley Graham Du Bois to Mr Prattis, The Pittsburgh Courier, March 1960, Shirley Graham Du Bois Papers, 18.1, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

[iii] Shirley Graham Du Bois to Mr Prattis, The Pittsburgh Courier,  March 1960, Shirley Graham Du Bois Papers, 18.1, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

[iv]  Shirley Graham Du Bois, Negroes in the American Revolution, Freedomways, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Summer 1961), pp.125-135, JSTOR <https://www.jstor.org/stable/community.28036976 > 

[v] Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois, (New York: New York University Press, 2000), p. 173.

[vi] Horne, Race Woman, p.17.

[vii] Ibid, p. 188.

[viii] Ibid, p.188.

[ix] Shirley Graham Du Bois, ‘Letter to Robert F. Williams’, March 22, 1967, 19.7, Shirley Graham Du Bois Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

[x] Shirley Graham Du Bois, ‘Shirley Graham Du Bois speaking at UCLA 11/13/1970’, UCLA Communications Department, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3mhM3bHCZ8&ab_channel=UCLACommunicationArchive

[xi] Shirley Graham Du Bois, quoted in Yunxiang Gao, Arise, Africa! Roar, China! Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2021), p. 68.

[xii] Shirley Graham Du Bois, quoted in Horne, Race Woman, p. 260.

[xiii] An Appeal of Mrs. Shirley Graham Du Bois, International Statements of Support 1970-1971, Box 4, Folder 14, Angela Davis Legal Defense collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library.  

[xiv] Ibid.