Book Review

Canada and the United States

The initial reaction to this biography and, indeed, to the title reference to Shirley Graham Du Bois as "Race Woman" might be that both the book and the appellation are largely, if not solely, a consequence of her being the second wife of the famous black scholar and noted Pan-Africanist W. E. B. Du Bois. Opening with a description of the "memorial meeting" for the late Graham Du Bois at the Paposhan Cemetery for Revolutionaries in Beijing, China, in April 1977, attended by Chinese and other foreign dignitaries, Gerald Horne, in fascinating detail and eloquently written prose, establishes early on that this was no ordinary woman and that the basis of his title both precedes and extends beyond her marriage to the well-known Du Bois. Horne offers readers a riveting biography of Graham Du Bois, who criss-crossed the United States as well as parts of Western and Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia, frenetically shifting jobs, careers, and locales while writing essays, plays, and biographies, engaging in fascinating, indeed complex relationships with prominent and not-so-prominent men and women, and becoming more and more involved in radical politics. Indeed, Horne's masterfully woven story of his subject's "multiple lives" is worthy of the dramatic pageantry that was the source of her initial professional success and notoriety.	1
Lola Shirley Graham was the only daughter of a well-educated African Methodist Episcopal minister who fostered her scholarly and political fervor both by reading to her and by "providing her with the liberating idea that Jim Crow could be confronted," as he faced a white mob in New Orleans with a "loaded gun on top of his Bible" (p. 40). Her father's courage, Horne maintains, made an indelible impression on the young woman. Her mother cultivated Graham's musical and creative talents, which were evident in the grand dramatic productions as well as the persona she constructed; both reflected a mix of fact and fiction. It appears that details, even factual details and personal responsibilities, had little relevance for a woman with Graham's unbridled personal and professional ambitions. She reduced her age (sometimes by as much as ten years), changed her married name from "McCants" to "McCanns," declared herself a widow when she was a divorcee, recklessly borrowed money from friends and associates, and abandoned the two young children, Robert and David, from her first marriage.	2
In 1926, Graham left her sons in the care of relatives to explore Paris. Her professed guilt about the time spent away from her children notwithstanding, when not traveling to France during the period from 1927 to 1930 Graham "worked as a music librarian at Howard University and a music teacher at Morgan State University in Baltimore, and... took classes at various schools during her summers, including Columbia University" (p. 54). After the late 1930s, she devoted herself to racial uplift and political work, adopted an increasingly leftist political agenda, and became financially successful as an author of several noted biographies (criticized by some for her "inclusion of imagined dialogue") (p. 104). As the YWCA-USO Director at Fort Huachuca (Arizona), she received national attention for defending a group of black soldiers who had been court-martialed. Afterward, Graham moved to New York City to become co-organizer and assistant field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). This appointment, Horne writes, "proved to be a halfway house between her life in the arts and her impending life in politics" (p. 97).	3
By the end of the 1940s, there was little doubt, according to Horne, that Graham "was to be found in deed—and word—in a tight embrace with the much-reviled U.S. Left" (p. 109). Besides her close friendship with Communist leaders and her support for various left publications and organizations, in 1947 she joined W. E. B. Du Bois in publicly criticizing the U.S. government for various "human rights violations" (p. 111). Following Du Bois's eventual ouster from the NAACP in September 1948, Graham organized his full-scale defense, exhibiting what Horne referred to as "a blackbelt in the art of verbal facility." Among other equally acerbic remarks, Graham accused NAACP leaders of having "fastened a cord around its own neck...that would [eventually] strangle it" (p. 112).	. . .