Shirley Graham Du Bois

Lola Shirley Graham was born on 11 November 1896 in Indianapolis, Indiana, though some sources give Evansville. She was the only girl among five children of David A. Graham, an African Methodist Episcopal minister, and Etta Bell Graham. Raised to value Black culture, music and social justice, she studied music at Howard University and later at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1926.

She raised two sons as a single mother, then studied at Oberlin College, where she completed Tom-Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro. In 1932 it was staged at Cleveland Stadium by the city's opera company with a cast of 500 before an audience of about 10,000, and was broadcast on NBC. It is regarded as the first opera by an African American about African Americans, telling the history of Black music from Africa to Harlem through the sound of the tom-tom drum.

Turning to theatre, she studied at Yale's School of Drama and wrote plays including Coal Dust, I Gotta Home and Track Thirteen. She also became a successful author of biographies for young readers, among them a life of Frederick Douglass, and won the Messner and Anisfield-Wolf prizes.

In 1951 she married W.E.B. Du Bois. Their later years were marked by legal battles with the U.S. government over passports and Du Bois's alleged communist links, and in 1961 they accepted President Kwame Nkrumah's invitation to move to Ghana and became Ghanaian citizens. She became a founding editor of Freedomways and from 1964 to 1966 was the organising director of Ghana Television.

After her husband's death in 1963 and the coup that toppled Nkrumah in 1966, she left Ghana and travelled in Africa, Asia and Europe, advocating for anti-colonialism. She wrote biographies of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Julius Nyerere, and the novel The Zulu Heart. She died of cancer in Beijing on 27 March 1977, and is buried at the Du Bois Memorial Centre in Accra.