Shirley Graham Du Bois’s Cold War-era Curation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Legacy
Note: Written by Phillip Luke Sinitiere, this essay continues the forum on Shirley Graham Du Bois. This forum on Graham Du Bois, curated by 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.” Emphasizing what Sinitiere terms Shirley Graham Du Bois’s “curatorial imagination during the Cold War,” this essay “documents her creative, literary, and archival work in promoting W.E.B. Du Bois’s intellectual legacy.”
In 1965, the Black radical journal Freedomways published a memorial issue devoted to W.E.B. Du Bois two years after his death in Ghana. Over three dozen contributors commemorated his life’s work as an intellectual and activist. They documented the impact of his efforts as a freedom-fighting journalist and author who wrote powerfully about the historical and cultural significance of Black experiences across the Diaspora. While many contributors recounted Du Bois’s work in history, Shirley Graham Du Bois looked ahead to actualize her late husband’s legacy for the future. Writing from Accra, where she would live until a 1966 political coup in Ghana unseated Kwame Nkrumah, and thereafter eventually relocating to Egypt, Graham Du Bois stated, “For W.E.B. Du Bois there must be no idle mourning. He lives in greater abundance than ever before. . . .He lives in our deepest convictions, faith, work and dreams.”[1]
History shows that Graham Du Bois followed her own admonition to find meaningful purpose in grieving her spouse’s death. The “greater abundance” she mentioned referred to Du Bois’s legacy, and to the large paper trail of writings, manuscripts, and correspondence he left behind. The work and dreams to which Graham Du Bois gestured hinted at her plans for enacting Du Bois’s intellectual legacy, efforts she unfailingly pursued until her passing in 1977.
To promote Du Bois’s intellectual legacy, Graham Du Bois wrote books about him and gave lectures and speeches championing his ideas and activism. Furthermore, she supported scholars working on Du Bois-related topics and had a leading hand in placing Du Bois’s massive collection of personal papers and manuscripts in archival repositories. This essay emphasizes what I term Shirley Graham Du Bois’s curatorial imagination during the Cold War.[2] It documents her creative, literary, and archival work in promoting W.E.B. Du Bois’s intellectual legacy. As historian Gerald Horne observes about the shared intellectual affinities between Graham Du Bois and Du Bois in Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois, “Being able to flaunt his presence was an emblem of her own success.” Yet, their political kinship as Black leftist radicals also meant that she aimed to serve as an “ideological shield” to preserve the work of her husband in history and memory.[3]
As a writer, Graham Du Bois used the power of the printed word to advance Du Bois’s legacy. In 1964, the year after his death, she published a volume of his poetry in Ghana. Selected Poems by W.E.B. Du Bois, which featured a foreword by Kwame Nkrumah, included well-known verse like “A Litany at Atlanta” (composed in response to the city’s 1906 race riot) along with late career poetry from the 1950s such as “Ghana Calls” and “I Sing to China.” To establish the fact of her curation while nodding to her collaboration with Du Bois, Graham Du Bois recalled that “The University of Ghana planned this publication of the first selected collection of his poems as a tribute to him in the evening of his life. He was deeply appreciative and enjoyed going over the manuscript as I typed up pages.” She also wrote that Du Bois’s “Prose and verse flow and blend until frequently they become indistinguishable. His poems, therefore, are not written as lyrical entities, but they must be seen as passionate outcries which demand the beat of rhythm, the cadence of song and the flow of deep waters.” While Africans across the continent knew Du Bois as the originator of Pan-Africanism and therefore mostly as a political activist, Graham Du Bois, who was a published poet and creative writer herself, wished to enlarge his legacy by making more widely available his work as a poetic artist.[4]
With time and reflection, nearly a decade after Du Bois’s passing Graham Du Bois published a memoir of her life with him titled His Day Is Marching On in 1971. Drawing from a large portion of Du Bois’s archives then located in her Cairo home, Graham Du Bois described their fastidious work in the peace and antiwar movement in the U.S. during the Cold War, their legal and cultural battles with McCarthyism in the 1950s, the international leftist networks with which they were involved, and finally their life together in Africa during the early 1960s. Committed to the dissemination of his ideas, Graham Du Bois included two appendixes in the book, a 1958 speech of Du Bois’s delivered in Africa as well as a poetry selection (“Ghana Calls”) who’s final phrase is appropriately “Pan-Africa!,” a line that signaled her own politics and symbolized the global Du Bois legacy she supported.[5]
A final book of Graham Du Bois’s appeared in the 1970s, Du Bois: A Pictorial Biography. Published posthumously in 1978, the innovative text opened a visual window into the life and times of W.E.B. Du Bois. While Du Bois saved many photos during his lifetime, the abundance of images from the 1950s and 1960s revealed Graham Du Bois’s meticulous efforts in documenting their Cold War-era lives both at home in the US and abroad in Africa, China, and Europe. Numerous photos feature a smiling Du Bois and Graham Du Bois, a decision by Shirley to show expressions of joy in the midst of politically repressive conditions. She wished to present a human Du Bois, the ordinary person behind the public-facing Black scholar of notable reputation.[6]
In addition to her writings, in the early-to-mid 1970s Graham Du Bois supported Du Bois’s legacy by traveling from Cairo to the U.S. to give dozens of lectures across the country, including an interim teaching post at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) in the Black Studies department that bore her famous husband’s name. On a lecture tour during the winter of 1970-71 Graham Du Bois spoke at a number of HBCUs including Howard, the Institute of the Black World at Atlanta University, and Fisk University. At Fisk, Graham Du Bois spoke of her knowledge of African history and about her travels abroad, remarking on the solidarity of Third World alliances in support of anti-imperialism, socialism, and economic democracy.[7] Lecturing a few years later at Vanderbilt University, Graham Du Bois traced out the prehistory of Du Bois’s involvement in numerous Pan-African Congresses across the twentieth century. She named his legacy in the present historical moment by relating the political Cold War alignments of exploited and oppressed peoples across the globe to Du Bois as an founder of Pan-Africanism.[8]
Graham Du Bois’s support of Du Bois’s legacy also played a role in the proliferation of scholarship on the towering Black intellectual, both within and beyond the U.S. While it is true that in the 1950s and 1960s Graham Du Bois exercised decisive influence on scholarly access to Du Bois’s personal papers then in her possession, it is equally accurate to say that she supported the expansion of scholarship on Du Bois.[9] For example, a German scholar of African history named Imanuel Geiss, spent a week in Accra in January 1965 researching in the Du Bois manuscripts that Shirley held. He was particularly interested in documents related to the Pan-African Congresses and Du Bois’s role in them.[10] Shirley wrote to Aptheker a few weeks later to let him know Geiss was headed to the U.S. and interested in seeing manuscript materials during his stay. “While we do not know him personally, he comes highly recommended and seems to be sincere and diligent in his pursuit of Truth,” she noted.[11] Several years after consulting Du Bois’s manuscripts, Geiss published two articles on Du Bois and Pan-Africanism.[12] The intellectual fruit of international research, Geiss’s Cold War-era focus on Du Bois’s global impact aligned with Graham Du Bois’s vision of her husband’s legacy as a Pan-African intellectual.
In concert with Du Bois’s wishes, Graham Du Bois also supported the communist intellectual and historian Herbert Aptheker’s plans to edit and publish Du Bois’s writings.[13] At Du Bois’s 83rd birthday dinner in 1951 arguably at the height of McCarthyism’s antiblack, anticommunist repression, Aptheker had spoken on the need to preserve his comrade’s archives. “[Du Bois’s] own writings produced now at the peak of his unparalleled accumulation of experience, learning and skill, must be made available to the world. Those who join in making this possible honor themselves and simultaneously help fortify and stimulate all that is noblest in American life,” he stated.[14] In close collaboration with Graham Du Bois, during the next two decades Aptheker produced critical scholarly editions of Du Bois’s writings with the University of Massachusetts Press and the Kraus Thomson publishing company in New York. Between 1973 and 1986, Aptheker published over fifty anthologies of Du Bois’s voluminous writings. In a preface to the Kraus Thomson series, Graham Du Bois reflected on the “tremendous undertaking” of such an expansive editorial project. She was especially pleased that Du Bois’s late-career books like The Black Flame trilogy—texts impacted by the attempted Cold War quarantining of Black radical writers—would receive a second life under Aptheker’s guiding editorial hand. “Seldom does one find such a combination of scholarship, research tenacity and dedication as [Aptheker] has brought to the Du Bois project,” Graham Du Bois commented. Thus, in a mutually supportive, collaborative arrangement, they succeeded in providing for the next generation access to Du Bois’s enormous “contribution to the study of Black Culture and History.”[15]
The final example of Graham Du Bois’s Cold War-era curation of Du Bois’s legacy was her signature role in safeguarding his writings, archives, and manuscripts for posterity. To support this work, she tried to launch a Du Bois Foundation for “the preservation and perpetuation of Dr. Du Bois’ Library—perhaps the best library of colored peoples in America.”[16] While her initiative did receive some support in the early 1950s, the short-lived effort did not succeed at that time. However, Graham Du Bois’s legacy efforts eventually prospered.
Throughout the 1950s frequent correspondence between Du Bois, Graham Du Bois, and Fisk University considered the merits of his archives going to Nashville.[17] For instance, in a late January 1958 letter to Fisk Du Bois described his archives and expressed his wishes: “In a secure and weather-proof basement are twelve or more steel file cases and a couple of dozen cardboard cases which contain letters and papers covering my career and activities from childhood to the present. . . .But naturally I should prefer that this material go to a Negro University and my first choice would naturally be Fisk University.”[18] Three years later, Graham Du Bois and Du Bois, in concert with Fisk librarian Arna Bontemps, placed a portion of his library, manuscripts, and archives at his alma mater, officially known as the W.E.B. Du Bois Collection. A few weeks later the couple moved from Brooklyn to Accra. They brought some of the remaining archives with them to Ghana and left the final third of Du Bois’s manuscript collection in Brooklyn with Herbert Aptheker, portions of which would appear in Kraus Thomson and UMass Press publications under his general editorship.
Twelve years later in 1973—and a decade after Du Bois’s passing—Graham Du Bois deposited the remainder of his manuscripts and personal papers at UMass. Despite virulent anticommunist elements in Amherst and across the state who expressed outrage that UMass would dare house the archives of a communist—still in the midst of the Cold War’s bipolar effects on politics and culture—UMass’s first Black chancellor Randolph Bromery, along with collaboration from Black Studies department faculty like Esther Terry, Michael Thelwell, and John Bracey as well as the university archivist Katherine Emerson and UMass Press editor Leone Stein ensured the acquisition succeeded. After years of processing Du Bois’s massive collection, the W.E.B. Du Bois Papers opened for research in 1980. These collective efforts supported Graham Du Bois’s expansive vision of keeping Du Bois’s intellectual legacy alive.[19]
Graham Du Bois’s attention to Du Bois’s archives and the conscientiousness she exercised toward preserving the “trail of documents” was part of an important dimension of Black women’s cultural labor during the twentieth century.[20] For example, Amy Jacques Garvey’s published anthologies helped to promulgate Marcus Garvey’s ideas for future generations, something her writings in the 1960s sought to connect to contemporaneous liberation movements.[21] Likewise, Eslanda Robeson’s thoughtful curation of Paul Robeson’s archives preserved his legacy. Their son Paul Robeson, Jr. wrote that her efforts kept “valuable historical record[s] intact despite many moves between distant places. History is forever enriched by her feat.”[22] Paul Jr.’s daughter Susan, herself deeply immersed in her grandparents’ legacy, attributed Eslanda’s curatorial practice to her “uncanny sense of history.”[23]
Graham Du Bois, Jacques Garvey, and Robeson’s preservational conscientiousness helped to curate the legacies of the notable Black leaders with whom they were connected. Yet their own historical sensibilities, as writers, speakers, and cultural workers meant that they each collected artifacts documenting their lives too. While in one measure this means that they have lived within the shadow of their well-known spouses, the historical fact of their own history in the archives has over time through contemporary scholarship revealed that they in fact lived their own lives on their own terms. Thus, Shirley Graham Du Bois’s Cold War-era multifaceted curation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s legacy, as this article demonstrates, ensured the historical longevity of her own life and work well into the twenty-first century.
-Phillip Luke Sinitiere
Phillip Luke Sinitiere is Scholar in Residence at the W.E.B. Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst. He is also professor of history and humanities at the College of Biblical Studies, a predominately African American school located in Houston’s Mahatma Gandhi District. His latest book is Forging Freedom in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Twilight Years: No Deed but Memory (University Press of Mississippi, 2023). In November 2025, the University of Pennsylvania Press will publish a book he co-edited with Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, Shirley Graham Du Bois: Artist, Activist, and Author in the African Diaspora.
Endnotes:
[1] Shirley Graham Du Bois, “Greetings,” Freedomways (Winter 1965): 9. Emphasis in original.
[2] Phillip Luke Sinitiere, “Black Radicalism and Shirley Graham Du Bois’s Curatorial Imagination,” Black Perspectives, March 15, 2019, https://www.aaihs.org/black-radicalism-and-shirley-graham-du-boiss-curatorial-imagination/.
[3] Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 128, 140.
[4] Shirley Graham Du Bois, ed., Selected Poems by W.E.B. Du Bois (Accra: Ghana Universities Press, 1964), 8–9.
[5] Shirley Graham Du Bois, His Day Is Marching On: A Memoir of W.E.B. Du Bois (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971), 378.
[6] Phillip Luke Sinitiere, “‘There must be no idle mourning’: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Legacy as a Black Radical Intellectual,” Socialism and Democracy 32/3 (2018): 207–230.
[7] “Shirley Graham Du Bois at Fisk University,” Fisk News: The Alumni Quarterly, Winter 1971, 6–12, Shirley Graham Du Bois Biographical File, Fisk University.
[8] Shirley Graham Du Bois, “W.E.B. Du Bois: The Father of Pan-Africanism,” April 7, 1975, Vanderbilt University, Box 28, Folder 8, Shirley Graham Du Bois Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
[9] Phillip Luke Sinitiere, “‘She has complete charge of their eventual disposition’: Shirley Graham Du Bois’s Curation of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Archives,” in Shirley Graham Du Bois: Artist, Activist, and Author in the African Diaspora, eds. Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel and Phillip Luke Sinitiere (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), 68–95.
[10] Shirley Graham Du Bois to Herbert Aptheker, January 17, 1965, Box 18, Folder 14, Shirley Graham Du Bois Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
[11] Shirley Graham Du Bois to Herbert Aptheker, January 24, 1965, Box 18, Folder 14, Shirley Graham Du Bois Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
[12] Imanuel Geiss, “Notes on the Development of Pan-Africanism,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 3/4 (June 1967): 719–740; Imanuel Geiss, “Pan-Africanism,” Journal of Contemporary History 4/1 (1969): 187–200. Later, Geiss expanded his work in a book, The Pan-African Movement: A History of Pan-Africanism in America, Europe and Africa, trans. Ann Keep (New York: Africana Publishing, 1974).
[13] Phillip Luke Sinitiere, “‘Dr. Du Bois gave me complete access to his Papers’: Herbert Aptheker’s Editorial History with W.E.B. Du Bois’s Papers and Manuscripts,” Phylon 60/1 (Summer 2023): 3–35.
[14] Herbert Aptheker, “Written for the Celebration of 83rd birthday of WEBD,” Box 129, Folder 2, Herbert Aptheker Papers, Stanford University.
[15] Shirley Graham Du Bois, “Preface by Mrs. Shirley Graham Du Bois,” in W.E.B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1683-1870, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited, 1973), 5–7.
[16] Shirley Graham Du Bois to Professor and Mrs. Frank W. Waymouth, March 31, 1953, Box 17, Folder 11, Shirley Graham Du Bois Papers, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University.
[17] Phillip Luke Sinitiere, “‘An Impressive Basis for Research’: Arna Bontemps’ Co-Creation of the W.E.B. Du Bois Collection at Fisk University,” The Black Scholar 52/2 (2022): 50–62.
[18] W.E.B. Du Bois to Stephen J. Wright, January 27, 1958, Box 5, Folder 4, Arna Bontemps Papers, Fisk University.
[19] Phillip Luke Sinitiere, “Paper Chase: How W. E. B. Du Bois’s Archive Came to UMass,” Bookmark Magazine (November 2020): 34–37, https://bookmarkmagazine.library.umass.edu/the-paper-chase/; Phillip Luke Sinitiere, “27th Annual Du Bois Lecture,” UMass Amherst, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD3HLyzk2P8. See also the UMass Amherst Libraries digital humanities project that commemorated the 1980 ceremony inaugurating the opening of the Du Bois Papers for scholarly research, “The 40th Anniversary of the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers at UMass Amherst,” UMass Amherst Libraries, September 22, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iahE0syg1T8.
[20] Ula Taylor, “Archival Thinking and the Wives of Marcus Garvey,” in Contesting the Archives: Finding Women in the Sources, eds. Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry J. Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 125–134.
[21] Ula Yvette Taylor, The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 46–47, 62–63, 216, 223–224; A. Jacques Garvey, “That Dynamic Leadership of Garvey,” The Star, October 4, 1966, n.p. and “When Negroes Got Sense of Dignity,” The Star, October 6, 1966, n.p., Box 10, Folder 9, Amy Garvey Memorial Collection on Marcus Garvey, Fisk University.
[22] Paul Robeson, Jr., The Undiscovered Paul Robeson: Quest for Freedom, 1939-1976 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010), 363–364.
[23] Susan Robeson, The Whole World in His Hands: A Pictorial Biography of Paul Robeson (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1981), 8.
