Lola Shirley Graham DuBois

Lola Shirley Graham DuBois was not only the second wife of W.E.B. DuBois, but she was an activist, musicologist and playwright. In the early years of 1909, when she was only 13, Graham wrote to the local Indianapolis newspaper that she had been denied the right to swim in a local YWCA pool because of racial discrimination.   After traveling with her minister father and living in several states, Graham would settle  with husband Shadrach McCants in the early 1920s. They would bear two children before divorcing in 1927.   With a new lease on life, Graham left her sons with her parents and sought education at Oberlin College. After getting her bachelors in music history and studying at the Sorbonne, Columbia University, Howard University and Morgan State College, Shirley Graham opened her first opera at Cleveland Stadium in 1932, "Tom-Toms: An Epic of Music and The Negro." A reported 10,000 people saw her work in a three-act production in the first performance. She would draw 15,000 in the second. With that, she had become the first African-American woman to write and produce an opera with an all-black cast.   Heading back to her roots, Graham would take on the job of YWCA-USO director of Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where 15,000 black male and female soldiers were trained. This was the same organization that denied her access to the pool as a child. But controversy rose when three black soldiers were killed in a protest, and Graham defended their actions. Just as soon as she was dismissed, she was hired by the NAACP as field director. Graham would write three biographies: "George Washington Carver," "Paul Robeson" and "Frederick Douglass." At the age of 54, she would wed 84-year-old W.E.B. DuBois. The duo would fight for civil rights for 12 years until his death. Graham continued the fight overseas until she died of breast cancer in 1977.

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