Race Woman

The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois

Gerald Horne

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780814773376
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

One of the most intriguing activists and artists of the twentieth century, Shirley Graham Du Bois also remains one of the least studied and understood. In Race Woman, Gerald Horne draws a revealing portrait of this controvertial figure who championed the civil rights movement in America, the liberation struggles in Africa and the socialist struggles in Maoist China. Through careful analysis and use of personal correspondence, interviews, and previously unexamined documents, Horne explores her work as a Harlem Renaissance playwright, biographer, composer, teacher, novelist, Left political activist, advisor and inspiration, who was a powerful historical actor.

1

Family

SHE WAS BORN Lola Shirley Graham on 11 November 1896, but at points in her life she shaved as much as ten years from her true age.¹ The place where she was born, Indianapolis, Indiana, at that time was not the most hospitable place for African Americans. Jim Crow was prevalent. The conditions that would allow Indianapolis to become “the unrivaled bastion of the Invisible Empire [Ku Klux Klan] in Mid-America” in the 1920s were already in force when Graham was born.²

Her family background was as varied as her life. She claimed French, Scotch-Irish, English, and Native American ancestry, in addition to African; her light brown skin was suggestive of this potpourri. Despite her multiracial background, she was explicit in stating, “I am a Negro. I say that first because here in America that fact is the most determining factor of my being. I cannot escape.”³

This conclusion and her background were quintessentially those of the United States. She once recalled that “one of my forebears was with Washington at Valley Forge, another died in the Battle of Shiloh; a great-grandfather fought his way out of slavery; a town in Indiana is named for my grandmother.”⁴ This great-grandfather, Wash Clendon, “after buying his freedom in Virginia, had come to Indiana and settled. He was a blacksmith and could read and write.… After a while he acquired land.… His farm was one of the ‘underground railway’ stations.”⁵ Graham Du Bois also recollected a story that has been discounted, “that our great-aunt Eliza was the original ‘Eliza’ immortalized by Harriet Beecher Stowe.”⁶ The larger point, however, was accurate: her roots in this nation ran deep.

Her Native American ancestry came from her mother’s side of the family. Etta Bell Graham was born on 30 April 1873 near Kidder, Missouri. Her father, “Big Bell … a Cheyenne … stole his bride Mary from a plantation” near the Missouri River. After their marriage he made a living as a saddle maker. The family wound up living in St. Paul, Minnesota, where Etta was the “first colored graduate” of Central High School there.⁷

More is known about Graham Du Bois’s father. David A. Graham was born on 11 January 1861 in Princeton, Indiana.⁸ Like his daughter, he was relatively small: she was five feet two inches tall, he was five feet four. Graham Du Bois’s mother was his second wife, and while his first spouse “looked exactly like an Indian,” Etta Bell Graham “looked more Jewish in some ways, her high nose and so forth, quite fair.”⁹ By the time he married Etta Bell, he had two children; then he had three more with her. Shirley was his only daughter.¹⁰

David Graham was a preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church. His son Lorenz recalled him as a “well educated man; he had taught at Wilberforce for a while and then went into the ministry.” He was a pastor in a number of churches, “first in the north, the largest AME church in Indianapolis, the largest one in Detroit, the largest one in Chicago.” He seemed to be moving steadily higher in the ranks of the black petite bourgeoisie, but then, “because he offended the bishops … by his exposing of the rascality of some of them, they sent him away to the smallest parishes in the South they could find.”¹¹

Graham Du Bois recalled her father as “the last of the old-fashioned Negro preachers who was really the shepherd of his flock, who was totally devoted, who would give his last coat away.” In a phrase she would later use for one of her better-known plays, she noted that his attitude was that “the ravens fed Elijah, so we don’t have to worry and he didn’t worry.” Actually the Reverend Graham proved to be as prophetic as the original Elijah in that his insouciant approach toward taking care of himself and his family did not prove to be disastrous.¹² She too pointed to his “protest over the doings of a certain drunken and immoral Bishop” as a negative turning point in his career.¹³ For his part, the feisty Reverend Graham said he was eager to “more effectively pursue an uncompromising warfare upon corruption in every rank of the church.”¹⁴

His removal from the fast track of the AME church did not plunge the family into penury (Graham recalled, “I don’t remember ever having been without food or being cold”), though it was harmful to their economic well-being. Their father was not visibly worried about this decline, according to Graham Du Bois: “In one of her infrequent moments of ‘high tension’ my mother said that father should have been a monk—that he would have been happiest in a perfectly bare monastery!”¹⁵

Graham Du Bois had a high opinion of her father’s skill as a pastor: “he was a marvelous troubleshooter … in a community where there was racial trouble because he was … the kind of person who could both protect his flock and speak up to the white folks.” This opinion may have flowed from a particularly tense situation when she was a child and the family was living in New Orleans at a time of racial tension. There had been a well-publicized killing of an African American; Graham, who was no more than seven, “experienced a feeling of resentment” at the “burning” of this man. This feeling became more personal after a letter came to her father instructing him that if he held a protest meeting that he had announced, “he too would be ‘lynched.’” Then another letter arrived telling him, “We give you twelve hours” to leave town. In those racially charged times, “a white man would have called the police. But at that time a Negro in the South never thought of calling on the police to protect him.”

He arranged to have handbills passed out announcing a mass meeting at his church. In response, those opposed to black self-assertion threatened to burn down this striking edifice. Shirley Graham was not too young to recognize the gravity of the matter.

“Papa,” she wailed, “they may burn our house down. What are you going to do?”

“Never mind, dear,” he responded. “If they come, we’ll be ready for them,” he assured her with confidence.

Providing her with the liberating idea that Jim Crow could be confronted, the unruffled family had an early supper that day, then left home and marched a few paces to the nearby church. Graham was surprised to see such a large turnout. As was his wont, her father began on time with a prayer, then read a verse from the Bible: “The Lord your God goes before you to fight against your enemies. The battle is not yours but the Lord’s.” A self-reliant sort, her father proceeded to place a loaded gun on top of his Bible. Graham also noticed that a number of men had pistols resting in their laps. Her father then demanded that women and children leave the church; twenty-one men with loaded guns remained behind.

Shirley Graham was too nervous to sleep. She and her mother stood at the top of the stairs peering from the front of the house, which faced the front of the church. They could hear the frightening sound of an approaching mob. In the doorway awaiting them her father stood alone. She could hear bullets from the enraged mob whizzing through the night air. Her “father fired one shot in the air.… They were afraid of one man who had a gun—and who was not afraid!” The mob dispersed.¹⁶

This gripping incident left a lasting impression on Shirley Graham. Growing up in a state where Jim Crow had only recently been sanctified in the landmark case of Plessy v. Ferguson, she was able to witness firsthand that racial bullies could be made to retreat if confronted with countervailing force. Yet the gender lessons were probably not lost on her either: it was left to the men to do this crucial labor, while the women were ordered to retreat to the lair of domesticity.

Perhaps because she was the only daughter, her father doted on her. “My brothers all said that my father spoiled me and that I bossed all of them. Now there might be a little truth in that.… Well, naturally, I had to look after them, didn’t I, and tell them what to do.”¹⁷ Though she viewed it lightly in retrospect, this familial burden—being a de facto mother for her brothers—may have propelled Graham Du Bois into a premature marriage in an attempt to escape.

Her earliest memories of childhood were of her father reading to her. He would read to her from Uncle Tom’s Cabin; she would “always get the book” for him, and as he read “from time to time father would stop to explain something to us. And so we learned all about slavery.” “Every night” he would read to her, mostly novels, including Les Miserables and Quo Vadis.¹⁸ Throughout her life she remained a voracious reader of fiction and nonfiction alike.

In her late seventies, these memories remained with her.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.” St. John I, verse I. This was a favorite text of my Preacher father. He instilled in me, at a very early age, a veneration of the Word, a kind of reverence for that which was recorded. Those “bedtime moments” of him sitting beside my bed at night … shine as the happiest moments of my childhood days. I quickly learned to read because I wanted to make the Words my own. I handled all books gently. They were precious!¹⁹

Fondly she remembered her father as a man with

an inquiring and imaginative mind and this kind of mind he instilled in me.… He enjoyed historical novels, travel books, descriptions of faraway places and peoples. And these were the kinds of things he read to me beginning when I was no more than four years old. So it was before I could read I made friends with the characters in Charles Dickens [and Victor Hugo] novels.… I particularly remember [the] vivid description of the three wise men following the star of Bethlehem as told in the novel Quo Vadis.²⁰

She had finished all the novels of Dickens by the time she was twelve and eventually read her favorite novel, Les Miserables, in French. The Huguenots “opened up my imagination and my world.” Years later in 1958, when she was traveling through the desert of Egypt, the first thing that came to her mind were scenes from Quo Vadis that had been burned into her brain as a child.²¹

Though her father’s economic status may have plummeted from time to time, Graham Du Bois remained a privileged child. Her mother’s sister was married to Bishop Samson Brooks of the AME church, and on his shelves she found all the novels of Dickens, plus the works of Balzac. Her close encounters with the printed word inexorably pushed her in the direction of being a writer: “all of these things influenced me tremendously.” Though she “never thought about” herself as “a writer,” she “always wrote things.” Furthermore, though conscious of the various methods and styles that writers used to convey different points and moods, she “never tried to write like anybody else”; she just tried to say things in the “simplest possible terms so other people could get it.”²²

While her “mother worried about me a bit because I always had my nose ‘stuck in a book,’” her father continued to encourage this passion.²³ On the other hand, her mother encouraged her early interest in music—“Wagner had been my favorite of the composers”—and she learned to play the piano at a relatively early age.²⁴ This, in turn, influenced her writing “a great deal,” for she “learned what a symphony was and to project movement, theme, etc. and how to weave all together in allegro.” Her biography of Paul Robeson, for example, was written “consciously” like a “symphony of life.”²⁵

While the family lived in Tennessee her skill as a musician flourished. Her father’s church had acquired an organ, but her tiny legs were not long enough to pump the pedals, so she stood to conquer—her small fingers darted over the keys as her equally diminutive feet danced across the pedals.²⁶ As she was to do so often later in life, she adapted creatively and was not flummoxed by a situation that was not tailor-made for her. Then again, she would not have had the opportunity to adapt her creative skill as a musician if her father had not been in a position—not necessarily common for black pastors—to have an organ installed in his church. Her father influenced her in another way that was not immediately apparent. His nomad-like wandering from parish to parish—Indiana, New Orleans, Nashville, Colorado, the Pacific Northwest, and so on—frequently thrust her into unfamiliar settings where she was compelled to adapt by making friends easily; this helped to shape her outgoing personality. Her family experience provided other advantages. When she entered school in New Orleans, admittedly her early experience with books gave her a distinct advantage over many of her classmates. Her school was close to the St. Louis Cathedral near Orleans Street, and her teachers were part of an “order of Negro nuns.” Graham and her fellow students, who were also “predominantly ‘light,’” were privileged by the complex politics of color in New Orleans. This happened to be one of the better schools for Negroes in the city, which meant that her color and her father’s concern for her provided her with a certain advantage early in life. Though she “decided at once” that she liked school, her life there was not without incident: early on she contracted “typhoid fever” from the water and all of her hair “came out.” Her father decided to enroll her elsewhere.²⁷

David Graham was decidedly a most significant influence on her early life, and not simply because of his encouragement of her literary skills. He was a humanitarian, who “brought every itinerant, shabby preacher to [the] house for dinner.” He organized NAACP chapters; “enterprising boys sold copies of the Crisis after meetings at [his] church.” Her father was a “Du Bois man,” not a follower of Booker T. Washington. This influenced her directly, for she “first read articles ...