How Should We Understand the Life and Legacy of Shirley Graham Du Bois?

Note: We are launching today our series of virtual forums at the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences titled “Learning from Their Lived Experiences during the Cold War,” with a forum on the life and legacy of Shirley Graham Du Bois (1896-1977), curated by Tionne Alliyah Parris and Phil Sinitiere. The Cold War remains relevant to us in 2025 because, while the war officially took place from the 1940s to the 1990s, its intellectual, political, economic, and social legacies remain with us today.

This series of Cold War forums at the Miami Institute will bring together virtual roundtables of writers, activists, and observers from all around the world to discuss how various historical actors— including and beyond Shirley Graham Du Bois— lived and experienced the Cold War. In the process, we hope to better appreciate all of our shared humanities across the Cold War rivalries of the United States and the Soviet Union and, through shared dialogue, better appreciate how we can come together to shape a future that is less haunted by the legacy of this war.

For this forum on Graham Du Bois, Tionne Alliyah Parris and Phil Sinitiere have invited us to consider how we should understand the life and legacy of Graham Du Bois. To what extent did she exist in the shadows of W.E.B. Du Bois, and to what extent did she have her own intellectual and political agenda and commitments? How can Shirley Graham Du Bois be understood in terms of the company she kept? As far as her relationship with W.E.B. Du Bois, how did Shirley Graham Du Bois impact his thoughts and reshape them? How should we understand who influenced whom in this relationship? And as far as the time period in which she lived, did she feel entrapped by the political and economic binaries of the Cold War, or did she live beyond them?

Today, the forum on Graham Du Bois begins with a contribution by Tionne Alliyah Parris titled, “Shirley Graham Du Bois and Cold War Connectivity in the Struggle for Black Liberation,” Miami Institute for the Social Sciences (Feb. 3, 2025). Please join us for this virtual discussion, which will evolve through a series of written essays on this site and will conclude with a virtual roundtable among the forum writers later in May 2025.