Shirley Graham Du Bois was a composer, playwright, biographer, organizer, and Pan-Africanist whose life joined revolutionary culture with the struggle for Black and African liberation. Born in Indianapolis in 1896, the daughter of a minister, she studied music in Paris and at Oberlin College. In 1932 her opera Tom-Tom premiered before an audience of thousands in Cleveland, making her one of the first Black women to compose and stage a full-scale opera. She went on to direct the Black unit of the Federal Theatre Project in Chicago, and she wrote widely read biographies of Paul Robeson, Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Banneker, and Phillis Wheatley that brought Black history to a generation of young readers.

Graham's politics grew steadily more radical. She organized for the NAACP and worked alongside the communist left, and in 1951 she helped found the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, an organization of Black women that fought lynching, segregation, and the persecution of Black radicals. That same year she married W.E.B. Du Bois, and the couple stood together against the McCarthy-era government that indicted him and revoked their passports. In 1961 she helped found the journal Freedomways, which became a major voice of the Black freedom movement and the Black left.

That year she and Du Bois moved to Ghana at Kwame Nkrumah's invitation. After her husband's death, she remained in Africa and became the founding director of Ghana's national television service, using it to promote African culture and liberation. She befriended Malcolm X during his visit to Ghana and supported liberation movements across the continent. After the 1966 coup against Nkrumah, she was forced out of Ghana and settled in Cairo. She died in Beijing in 1977, and her ashes rest beside her husband's in Accra. Her legacy is that of a cultural worker who used every art form at her command in service of the struggle for a free and united Africa.