Oberlin Alumni Magazine
Genius at the Intersection
February 20, 2025
Rebekkah Rubin ’13
This story originally appeared in the Spring 2021 issue of the Oberlin Alumni Magazine.
Before Shirley Graham (later Du Bois) enrolled at Oberlin in 1931, she taught music at Morgan College, now Morgan State University. When asked by the administration for her curriculum plan, she wrote:
“We hope to make an outstanding year of music here at Morgan College. Those who know me know how utterly and absolutely I believe in the musical ability of our people...Who am I? I am the product of a wisdom deep and profound, a wisdom ‘older than the flow of human blood in human veins’; I am the result of that wisdom being plunged into the fire of human suffering so terrible that we shrank from telling those stories of slavery. I am the product of that wisdom being glorified by the teachings of Christianity...I am all these things, still growing, still developing; I AM A NEGRO MUSICIAN.”
Graham had studied music at the Sorbonne for a year and worked as a music librarian at Howard University before entering Oberlin as a 35-year-old divorcée with two children, aged 8 and 6. It was a natural choice for Graham Du Bois, who received a bachelor’s of art in 1934 and a master’s degree the following year.
Courtesy of Oberlin College Archives
While a student, Graham Du Bois became the first Black woman to write, compose, and stage an opera with an all-Black cast. Tom-Tom: An Epic of Music of the Negro premiered in the summer of 1932 at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium and featured a cast of 500, a 21-foot waterfall, and a live elephant. Graham Du Bois collaborated with the community to put her historic production together; she recruited local church choirs to join the cast and held a contest for local students to design the set, with the winners receiving a $50 prize. Tom-Tom’s two performances in Cleveland attracted a crowd of over 25,000. But the opera has not been produced in full since its premiere 88 years ago.
After graduating from Oberlin, Graham Du Bois worked as a director, writer, and activist. She wrote and staged plays, published biographies, organized for the NAACP, and wrote for various newspapers and magazines. By 1946 she was a powerful political activist and publicly supported the Communist Party. In 1951, she married civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, whom she had first met when she was a young teen. She was 54 to his 83. Her file with the Federal Bureau of Investigation contains over 1,000 pages—exceeding her husband’s by more than 300 pages.
A.G. Miller, emeritus professor of religion at Oberlin, and Darko Opoku, chair of Africana studies, traveled to Ghana’s capital city, Accra, in 2016 and visited the W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Centre for Pan African Culture, which is housed in Graham Du Bois’ former home. This home was a safe haven for the couple following years of their persecution— and unsuccessful prosecution—by the United States government as a result of the Du Bois’ political involvement, making it difficult for them to find employment and move freely. In 1952, the U.S. seized passports of suspected Communist Party members and though that decision was reversed in 1958, the government continued to deny passports for some of the couple’s international travel for several years. Ironically, it was only around the time W.E.B. Du Bois left for Ghana, in 1961 at age 93, that he officially joined the Communist Party. That same year, the couple effectively lost their U.S. citizenship when they became Ghanian citizens.
Struck by the conspicuous absence of Graham Du Bois at Oberlin as a daughter of the college worth celebrating and elevating, Miller wrote in a blog post at the time: “I’m about to start a crusade for Oberlin College to be recognized as Shirley’s alma mater. Oberlin needs to recognize her and claim her more.”
Courtesy of Dale Preston ’83
When Miller returned to Oberlin, that is exactly what he did. He organized two winter term trips to Accra where students served as interns at the Du Bois Centre, and he put into motion the project of dedicating a plaque at the Du Bois Centre in honor of Graham Du Bois. The plaque was unveiled in the summer of 2018.
Fredara Hadley, visiting professor of ethnomusicology from 2013 to 2019, had traveled alongside Miller and other faculty to the plaque dedication in Ghana. When she ran into Tamika Nunley, assistant professor of history and comparative American studies, in the college archives, each discovered the other was researching Graham Du Bois.
Nunley had the idea to form an Oberlin Center for Convergence (StudiOC) learning community focused on Graham Du Bois, called the Student as Artist and Intellectual: Gleaning from the Legacy of Shirley Graham Du Bois. StudiOC learning communities encourage multidisciplinary work between college and conservatory students, and in this case, students could choose to take Nunley’s class, Upending the Archive, and/or Hadley’s Ethnomusicology: The Public Intellectual and Artist. The decision to enable students to create their own scholarly work while fostering collaboration between the college and the conservatory was key for both Nunley and Hadley.
“[Graham Du Bois] graduated from both the college and the conservatory, and it’s always been important for us to allow her to claim both of those lineages. She is, in a lot of ways, the epitome of an Obie,” Hadley says.
To provide students with archival materials, Nunley traveled to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute to scan 15,000-plus images of items from the Shirley Graham Du Bois archival collection. She deposited the images on a Google Drive that she shared with the students.
“[The students were] steeped in the historiography...they have this humongous archive in front of them, and they kind of have to sit with the weight of it all,” Nunley said. “It was important for me to empower them to decide what they wanted to examine further.”
Nunley’s students, with the help of Megan Mitchell, academic engagement and digital initiatives coordinator, researched and interpreted selected archival materials to create a digital book that is accessible online, as well as exhibit panels that will travel to the Du Bois Centre in Accra.
“We noticed that the kind of archival and object-based exhibits that featured Du Bois’ works were in abundance for [her husband], but very sparse for her,” Nunley says of the Du Bois Centre. “We decided to do these exhibit panels that travel so when visitors come, they can engage with [Graham Du Bois].”
Students in Hadley’s class focused on the two works Graham Du Bois created while she was a student at Oberlin—Tom-Tom and her thesis.
“I think that [these texts] work in partnership to give us a really profound snapshot of how she’s thinking about Africa, how she’s thinking about Blackness, how she’s thinking about America, how she’s thinking about music in that one little window of time—1932 to 1934,” Hadley says.
The score to Shirley Graham Du Bois’ opera Tom-Tom was rediscovered by a Harvard student in the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library.
Photo credit: Schelsinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard Univ.
Hadley’s students then imagined how they would stage Tom-Tom and wrote their own program notes. Sophia Bass ’20, who studied conducting and composition in the conservatory, imagined her staging of Tom-Tom at the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan.
“[I] was thinking about how Graham Du Bois was not afraid to take up space, especially as a Black woman navigating in an inherently racist society and navigating in a predominantly white male field,” Bass says.
Nancy Handleman ’20, a history major, considered the ways Graham Du Bois involved the community in the original production of Tom-Tom and imagined her staging in Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem.
Both Nunley and Hadley admitted to their students that the StudiOC course was an experiment.
“Everyone in the class labored intensely, and it was an outpouring of their heart for the work they do and an outpouring of their heart for [Oberlin] no matter how complicated it is for them,” Nunley says. “We are also making a statement about what we can be as an institution, in terms of what we say we value. [The students] weren’t artists and intellectuals because we had this class. Oberlin students have been public intellectuals and artists well before that. We just gave them a grade for it.”
Hadley and Nunley also organized a two-day symposium, Intersections: Recovering the Genius of Shirley Graham Du Bois, which highlighted the work created in the classes by bringing together students with preeminent scholars in the field of African American women’s intellectual history. The symposium opened with the unveiling of a plaque in honor of Graham Du Bois in the entrance of the conservatory library.
“Much that made this symposium special is not that we’ve brought in fancy [scholars] but that we’ve really positioned students to be interlocuters intellectually in the field. These students have done in-depth research and scholarly work on [Graham Du Bois] that has not been done before,” Nunley says.
As a celebration of Graham Du Bois’ musical lineage, conservatory students performed excerpts from Tom-Tom during the symposium. It was the first time Graham Du Bois’ work has been heard in Ohio since the opera’s premiere in Cleveland, but it will not be the last. Caroline Jackson Smith, chair of theater and professor of Africana Studies, and music director Courtney- Savali Andrews ’04 have been teaching a course this spring semester on Tom-Tom. They hope to stage the opera in the fall of 2022, exactly 90 years after its first production.
“This is a rich period for attention to Black women in history. I think we’re in the right time and place for this,” Jackson Smith says.
Tom-Tom, a three-act exploration of the African diaspora, and one of the first serious treatments of Africa in opera, was unique in its time.
“Her opera is so laced with spirituals, chanting, [and] jazz. She wanted it to be accessible—she was envisioning a Black audience and she wanted it to be representative of their experience, even if the form is something that is a little different for them,” Hadley says.
Conservatory student Sophia Bass was inspired by the work that Graham Du Bois accomplished while a student at Oberlin.
“Her approach to integrating traditional African musical elements and musical structures and infusing it into an inherently western art form, opera...was very untraditional during her time, and she did that at Oberlin,” Bass said.
Tenor Matteo Adams ’20 was one of the students who performed excerpts from Tom-Tom during the symposium.
“To hear the perspective from an African American woman [in the 1930s] is really extraordinary, and I felt really good to be a part of that,” Adams said.
“Graham Du Bois was always who she was. She was always concerned about the lives of Black people on the continent and in the diaspora; she was committed to preaching that sermon and advocating for that, [but] she was not committed to the medium through which she would do that—whether starting a magazine, writing biographies, writing an opera, she was going to sing that song, she was going to tell that story,” Hadley says.
For Nunley and Hadley, the StudiOC course and symposium were just the beginning of a newfound dedication to honoring Graham Du Bois on Oberlin’s campus.
“[Graham Du Bois] always defended Oberlin, even as she critiqued it; she was a fierce supporter of Oberlin and what she gleaned from her time at Oberlin. Seeing Oberlin as...the perfect place...to do the work of expanding our epistemology around Black women’s intellectual work is really a unique opportunity for us,” Nunley says.
“From the very beginning, we knew that anything we did with [Graham Du Bois] wasn’t just going to be rote and perfunctory,” Hadley says. “This is work that has literally sent us across the ocean and back here and transformed us. We tried to endow Oberlin with as much of her spirit as we can, as much of her legacy as we can. We know that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and we are excited to keep rolling.”
Rebekkah Rubin ’13 is a public historian and writer.
Editor's Note: In fall 2022, a traveling exhibit on Shirley Graham Du Bois appeared at the Langston Hughes Branch of the Cleveland Public Library.
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