Now Here’s A Black Female Composer Worth Rediscovering: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Wife

Shirley Graham Du Bois notched up plenty of achievements in her own right beyond the activism she shared with her husband: she was a novelist, playwright, biographer (of Paul Robeson, Booker T. Washington, and Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser), and radical who (in)famously joined the American Communist Party. But when she studied at the Sorbonne, her subject was music. The premiere run of her 1932 opera Tom-Tom was an enormous spectacle that drew audiences of 25,000 (the planned transfer t