Debuting her political voice: the lost opera of Shirley Graham.(The Music of African-American Women: Secular and Sacred, Uplift and Self-Assertion)(Shirley Graham Du Bois)

In 2001, the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard University acquired the collected papers of Shirley Graham Du Bois, the second wife of the celebrated sociologist and political leader William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois. Although his papers are archived at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Harvard is home to the Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, which cosponsored the acquisition. Moreover, the Schlesinger Library supports the mission of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study to promote studies of women, gender, and society. Within this collection of Graham Du Bois is a document previously believed to have been lost: the musical score to her opera Tom Tom, a three-act spectacle that she composed and premiered in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932. (1) The opera contains valuable clues connecting the young composer Shirley Graham to her later self as a formidable activist and cultural ambassador for socialism.

Shirley Graham was the first black American woman to compose an opera for a major professional organization. The Stadium Opera Company, precursor to the Cleveland Metropolitan Opera, commissioned her to write a distinctly "black opera" for its second summer season in 1932. Graham, then a student at Oberlin College, expanded a one-act play with incidental music that she had written earlier into a three-act opera titled Tom Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro. The opera received generous publicity and earned critical acclaim for its composer, yet it was never performed again and was soon forgotten. Moreover, Graham's career in the arts foundered within a decade.

Until recently, information about Shirley Graham--hereafter referred to by her maiden name--was limited to scholarship concerning the life and work of W.E.B. Du Bois, research that acknowledges her contributions primarily in terms of their partnership from the 1940s onward. Gerald Home's Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (2000) is the first biography devoted to examining her entire life and work. Horne acknowledges the importance of Tom Tom to Graham's work toward a career in music, and he discusses briefly the circumstances leading to the creation of her opera and its reception. Other than Horne's book and an essay by Kathy Perkins (1985), few scholars have discussed Graham's contributions to the arts before her involvement with and marriage to Du Bois. All save Horne presumed that the manuscript for Tom Tom was lost, unaware that Graham had it with her when she settled into residency in Cairo, Egypt, in 1968. It remains part of the trove of documents from Cairo that her son David brought back to the United States in 2000, now archived at the Schlesinger Library.

Tom Tom's journey into obscurity was the result of many factors, not the least of which has been a paucity of surviving sources for the opera. In its original form as a play, Tom Tom can be found in The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology of Early Plays, 1858-1938 (Hamalian and Hatch 1991). (2) A copy of the short score of Tom Tom, archived at the Schomburg Center for Black Culture in New York City, had been the only known source for the work in the United States; it is archived in the papers of Jules Bledsoe, who sang the lead role at the premiere. (3) This score is nearly identical to Graham's, but Graham's contains emendations in her own handwriting, as well as drafts for an overture and extra numbers for the third act.

Primary sources for the opera notwithstanding, Shirley Graham's political activism also contributed to the fate of both Tom Tom and her career in the arts. As will be shown, she had a lifelong passion for advancing her perspectives on social justice, and music was just one of the methods she used to promote her ideas. In a never-ending quest to expose the injustices against people of color worldwide, Graham modulated the rhetoric of her political voice many times and in many ways. Music and plays ultimately proved ineffectual as agents for social change, and so she transformed herself into a journalist and public advocate for socialism. Her later persona as an edgy, world-weary political activist seemed incongruous with her earlier image as an optimistic, promising young composer and playwright. Moreover, her contributions to extreme left-wing forums that criticized domestic and foreign policies caused officials in the U.S. government to classify her as a dangerous political radical.

Shirley Graham was one of many who received harsh retribution for their outspoken political affiliations during the Cold War. Alternately, she was vilified as an agitator who supported Soviet and Maoist regimes or dismissed as a femme fatale who converted the aging W.E.B. Du Bois (whom she married in 1951) into a Communist. The merits of these accusations fall into the purview of political historians (such as Horne) rather than into that of the ensuing discussion of her early musical contributions to black artistic discourse. Nevertheless, the following close reading of her opera and its ideological roots confirms that her interest in international politics predated both her work for the radical left and her relationship with Du Bois. Tom Tom thus offers us a portal for connecting what appears to be two seemingly disparate worlds--the artistic and the political--of Shirley Graham Du Bois.

At the time she wrote Tom Tom, Graham still believed that American democracy was capable of supporting and protecting the rights of its multicultural citizenry. This is clearly evident in her opera, which ends with its entire black cast embracing the spirit of Diaspora as a beacon of diversity that will heal the wounds of their collective past and guide them toward a prosperous and peaceful future. Indeed, the favorable reviews of Tom Tom and its creator after its premiere seemed to affirm that an era of equal opportunity for black Americans in the arts had arrived.