Misc.
Who are the authors of this article?
Gerald Horne and Margaret Stevens
Where was she buried?
China
Which countries did she live in when in Africa?
Citizen of Tanzania
Ghana
Egypt
Which Black Marxists did she “adopt” as “sons”?
Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, and Stokely Carmichael
What channel did Shirley direct, and what did it do?
Ghana TV, was to serve the people and educate but it actually ended up being pretty traditional in terms of gender norms
Who did Shirley co-lead Sojourners for Truth and Justice with?
Eslanda Robeson
Louise Thompson Patterson
Inspired by the leadership of women of color who paved the way for the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s.
What were some of the positions she held in organizations throughout her life?
Director of the Negro Unit at the Federal Theatre Project (FTP)
YWCA-USO director at Fort Huachuca
Assistant Field Director for the NAACP
Comrade in the CPUSA
What inspired her move to Ghana?
desire toward building an international movement in Africa coupled with their resentment of the U.S. government
Did Shirley support the Chinese or Soviet system of communism by the time she passed?
Shirley supported Maoist China
Where did she get inspiration for her opera, Tom-Tom? What kind of music inspired her?
Paris, Various forms of African music, Harlem Cabarets
Did her political ideology impact her artwork and its distribution?
No, Shirley’s transition away from theater was not a political retreat in the face of racism and sexism. Quite pragmatically, she needed a salary increase to support her children, and a change of careers was in order
What did Shirley’s son's death do to her? What did she do after? Who was there for her?
Caused her to go into a work frenzy of biographies, and then a doctoral program that she did not complete. Pete Cacchione was there to comfort her.
What was Shirley's relationship to Nasser’s Egypt?
She lived there after the 1966 coup in Ghana, and supported Gamal Nasser’s geopolitical position as a blockade from “white imperialism and aggression".
However, it was a controversial and contradictory relationship as Nasser’s government was receiving aid from Moscow and suppressing communist movements domestically
How did Shirley support Nkrumah and Ghana as the “first lady”?
Further hope for avoiding Neo-colonialism through Ghana TV.
Evening calls with Nkrumah to advise him.
Adopted “son”
Supported Nkrumah’s political strategy of thwarting the economic domination of the North Atlantic powers through Africa.
What were some of the criticisms of her first opera Tom-Tom?
The author argued that it adhered to “the predominant cultural norms” of society due to the portrayal of Africans as a “fundamentally emotional, rather than intellectual, political—much less proletarian—people”
Additionally, female dancers protested prior to a performance over the costumes and “striptease”, which was later abandoned as it reinforced the “biological determinism” portrayal of women
What were her feelings about the Church in organizing spaces?
She was frustrated by what she saw as the capitulation of the southern church constituency to Jim Crow; this was compounded by what she perceived to be chicanery and chauvinism of the preachers, who were far from the legacy of Reverend Graham. “Believe me,” she declared, “I can see more clearly why the Russians closed all the churches! Come the revolution—that would be the first thing I should advise—throughout the south. These fat, thieving, ignorant preachers! All of them should be put to work”
Explain the source of political and editorial disagreements between Shirley Graham Du Bois and others at the Freedomways magazine.
Disagreements emerged after the death of W.E.B. Du Bois, when Freedomways editor Esther Jackson Cooper, allowed Roy Wilkins, the “archenemy” of Du Bois, to write a tribute. This was after Shirley Graham Du Bois suggestions like Malcolm X were rejected.
This reflected the larger conflict between the “Old Left’s” hesitation to break with established activism and her desire to embrace emerging actors in the “Third World”, focusing on liberation and anti-imperialism struggles.
What is Pan-Africanism? What is Marxism?
PA: an ideology that promotes bonds of solidarity between all African peoples based on the principle that all people of African descent share a common history and thus a common destiny.
M: a social, political, and economic philosophy that emphasizes the historical struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie
Why did she return to America at the expense of her relation to the CPUSA?
Her desire to reach out to the youth in the Black Power movement in the States required that she make political concessions to the same government apparatus whose repression of political dissent had at one time driven her to the left.
When Shirley Graham went to Paris in 1927, it was claimed that “blackness became the rage in Paris during the 1920s,” Does anyone know what black arts movement took off in Paris during the 1930s?
DAILY DOUBLE!
Negritude!
In conversation with her race, how did Shirley Graham Du Bois’ gender impact her political activism?
taken hostage by the norms of “mothering,” norms that reinforced the social division of labor between men and women
In her efforts to become a renowned artist, she was continually negotiating within a dominant cultural apparatus in which she had to adhere to social mores of both “Negro” and female “respectability” if she hoped to secure any recognition from her peers, much less any financial compensation to be put toward her household
How did Shirley’s upbringing affect her approach to activism?
David Graham inculcated in the young Shirley a responsibility to challenge segregation in the “public sphere” only to enforce normative gender roles in the “private sphere.” He instilled in his daughter the commonplace notion that a woman’s primary social identity ought to be as a mother and caretaker.
she informally adopted several “sons” of Pan-Africanism, such as Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, and Stokely Carmichael
What pushed Graham Du Bois closer to Pan-Africanism?
If in her later years Graham Du Bois tended to favor Pan-Africanism over Marxism, perhaps her eyewitness accounts of Black workers struggling against Jim Crow without the support of their white class brethren were an important causal factor; the white female companion who witnessed Graham being denied entry at the YWCA did not come to her defense.
How did Shirley’s political ideologies shift over her lifetime? What forces were at play?
She shifted from Soviet allegiance toward Maoist ideologies.
Forces at play: Graham Du Bois’s loyalties to the Soviet Union were becoming increasingly strained as she gravitated away from what she saw as the Moscow/King approach to “peaceful coexistence” and toward the Beijing/Black Power call for militant national liberation.
How did Shirley’s art manifest throughout her life? How was it received?
Tom-Tom, criticized as portraying Africans as emotional rather than intellectual, reinforced biological determinism and women’s sphere, fights US feelings against taking Africa seriously
Teaching fine arts at TSU
Directed Swing Mikado and Little Black Sambo, The Big White Fog
Work dismissed as a waste of talent due to not showing proletarian struggle, but The Big White Fog was “communist propaganda”
Yale Drama School
Created a play “Graham’s Coal Dust”
Wrote a Novel: Zulu Heart