Shirley Graham came from Indiana. Her father was a Methodist minister who, proud of his race and confident of its destiny, imbued Shirley with a keen appreciation of the Negro's background in Africa and of his contributions to American life. When she was in her teens, her father became head of a school in Monrovia, Liberia. A brother accompanied the parents to Africa, but Shirley was left in Paris to attend school. At Oberlin College, Shirley wrote the music-drama "Tom-Tom", based on African music, and helped produce it in the Cleveland Stadium where she was acclaimed both as a musician and as a folk-poet. She graduated from Oberlin in 1934 and took her master's degree in 1935.
She taught school in the South, trained and conducted community choruses and orchestras, was Supervisor of the Negro Unit of the Federal Theater which brought "The Swing Mikado" to Broadway, and was one of the first U.S.O. directors appointed and sent to the Southwest with headquarters at Fort Huachuea, Arizona. All the time she had been writing— sometimes music, sometimes articles, and sometimes short stories. In 1938-40 she was a Julius Rosenwald Fellow for Creative Writing and spent most of the two years at Yale University.
Her biography of Dr. George Washington Carver started her on biographies for young people and adults, and her There Was Once a Slave: The Heroic Story of Frederick Douglass won her the Lionel Judah Tachna Foundation award for the best book combating intolerance in America.
Miss Graham is the widow of W.E.B Du Bois, and now makes her home in Cairo.
—from The Story of Phyllis Wheatley: Poetess of the American Revolution
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