...papers are archived 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.

Although not the first musical drama by a black American to depict African or African-American themes, Tom Tom was the first to attract a substantial mixed audience--approximately twenty-five thousand reportedly attended the two performances in Cleveland on July 7 and July 9, 1932 (Davis 1932c; Perkins 1985, 9). (4) However, the strength of its implications for black history obliged its creator to defend, if not further define, her ideas. Graham was not alone in her attempts to use dramatic spectacle to articulate a distinctly African-American perspective of black culture and history. A successful debut in Cleveland did not, therefore, guarantee forthcoming offers from other directors or playhouse managers interested in her opera.

While it is true that the extremes of success and failure are the bane of the music business, it also appears that Graham encountered far more misfortunes than triumphs. Her opera, unabashedly "pro-black" in topic and style, reveals also a woman who challenged social stereotypes by her very presence. Not one to be modest in exclaiming her exuberance for causes, Graham promoted herself at a time when American women, and particularly black women, were expected to remain silent, if not invisible, in intellectual and political forums. The double burden of the composer's sex and skin color imposed on her a stifling code of behavior that proved impossible to follow.

As both the librettist and composer of Tom Tom, Graham infused her work with a spirit of activism that would later help define her rhetoric when she embraced left-wing politics. In November 1954, recalling her youth in a speech to the Women's Evening Guild of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn, Graham Du Bois (1954) claimed that she had always felt passionate about promoting understanding between people of different ethnicities: "At a very early age I became conscious that people around me didn't know very much about Negroes.... This bothered me. I couldn't quite understand it, so I began writing in school. When I had a composition or an essay assigned, I would write about something which I didn't think the teacher knew anything about ... and I got the reputation for dealing with interesting subjects." Graham continued, noting that her enthusiasm for music and African culture demonstrated her aptitude for "dealing with interesting subjects":

Music was the thing in which I became professionally interested. I always thought that I was going to be a musician. I simply wrote things about people in an effort to help people to understand.... My feeling was that if the other children understood, if they really knew what Negroes did, and what they had contributed; if they really knew about Africa; if they knew that there were black people who had done this and that and the other, naturally they would see, and they would understand. Because they didn't know was the reason they acted the way they did.... This is really the beginning of how I came to be a writer.... I started out thinking in terms of music and my first compositions were musical compositions. Nevertheless, these also had something basically to do with teaching people about the Negro.

Whatever hopes Graham had that her opera would promote an understanding of African Americans, after its two performances in Cleveland Tom Tom was never performed again, and she never wrote another large-scale musical work. Issues related to the swift decline of her career foreshadow the frustrations that she would experience later in her political life. Looming behind every problem, whether a rejection of a Guggenheim Fellowship application (1931) or restrictions on her travel papers (1952, 1961, 1975), was the possibility that racism was the true culprit (Home 2000, 54, 146, 259).

Graham and her contemporaries often struggled under the scrutiny of white Americans obsessed with evaluating, benignly or otherwise, the increasing visibility of black American arts and letters. The number of black concert musicians had increased substantially since the turn of the twentieth century, and the rhetoric of the New Negro movement that had been accumulating adherents since 1925 challenged previous criteria for creating and evaluating black art. A central argument concerning the New Negro artists was the issue of African heritage, specifically, what components defined it and how artistic expressions should articulate it. Graham, who was invested deeply and openly in creating art that would rehabilitate public opinion about African Americans, embraced the ethos of Harlem Renaissance artists who sought to clarify black cultural identity through their works. Intellectually, she also embraced the larger, global community of pan-Africanists who were attempting to fashion a New Negro image as that of an internationally cosmopolitan black artist.

On the premise that the New Negro artists stood poised to eradicate racism and class hierarchy through their contributions to cultural capital, Graham immersed herself in writing plays, music, speeches, essays, and historical narratives in search of the most effective voice for articulating the distinct heritage of African Americans. As such, she wrote works that reflected contemporary tastes for "dialect," but she also explored topics that appealed to the black intelligentsia's perspectives on social problems within African-American communities. Her interest in writing black historical narratives rooted in African lineage reflects the significance of place and tradition to her many peer groups. History, colonialization, and African transnational politics influenced not only the stylistic characteristics of New Negro and Harlem Renaissance writing but also more global expressions of black identity among artists working outside the United States.

Given the changes and challenges to Anglo-white domination in the arts that were occurring throughout the twentieth century across the globe, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly the motivations behind the negative reviews of Shirley Graham's works later on, specifically plays that exposed racial and gender inequalities. Horne, while acknowledging both possibilities, also suggests that Graham ran the risk of sabotaging her own success by virtue of a hypervigilant stance against any criticism. All were likely reasons for her inability to persevere as an artist; however, the degree to which she used her dramatic works to advance her political agendas was overt enough to have provoked (consciously or otherwise) those who did not wish to engage with her ideas on racial equity. She never quite "fit" into the communities of Harlem or Chicago, where she worked among black intellectuals with social and political perspectives clearly grounded in American global supremacy.

This is not to say that Graham intentionally set out to create turmoil. An examination of the period of her life when she received the commission to write Tom Tom suggests the exact opposite. Its genesis and reception thus illuminate a pivotal moment in the formative years of an important historical figure whose need to share her experiences as distinct from Anglo-white reality was ongoing and, at times, urgent. Now that the extant short score to her long-forgotten opera has resurfaced, we can explore its message and structure to rediscover her political voice as it first emerged through music, before governmental censure nearly erased her unique imprint on historical records.

Musically, Tom Tom illustrates a self-conscious expression of race pride often evident in black American concert works from the early twentieth century, when many black American composers turned to their ancestral homeland for inspiration. African ritual, legend, and song were to these composers what the lore found in the Kalevala was to Sibelius or the Niebelungenleid to Wagner. Black composers during this time found the symphony, the musical, and the opera all suitable genres for supporting an emerging rhetoric of race pride. Graham, it will be shown, was keen on using Tom Tom to extend European-inspired musical nationalism to define a black aesthetic.

Graham had an aptitude for musical composition, having studied music through piano lessons and choir and even a few college courses in music. (5) In 1930, she enrolled in the fine arts degree program at Oberlin College, where she could specialize in music and creative writing. Graham was already a pianist with performing experience in both concert and popular works, and she was also a playwright and an entertaining public speaker. She seemed destined to join the ranks of the Oberlin Conservatory's small but distinguished coterie of black graduates who were accomplished concert musicians. However, she was long past the wide-eyed naivete of a typical undergraduate student by the time she came to Oberlin in 1931. At least thirty years old, she had divorced her husband Shadrach McCanns around 1925 (at the time, she claimed that she was a widow) but retained custody of their two sons. Her studies at Oberlin were ostensibly part of a plan to refine largely self-taught skills while also acquiring the academic credentials necessary to teach college music courses. In this sense, she appears as a benefactor of the African-American tradition of "uplift" by virtue of a musical education; however, her particular musical aptitude competed with a far more powerful political insight that had awakened within her just a few years before her arrival at Oberlin.

Prelude to an Opera: Paris

Besides her age, Graham's awareness of what Brent Hays Edwards (2003) describes as "cultures of black internationalism" culminating in Paris between the two World Wars also set her apart from most of her fellow students at Oberlin. From 1926 to 1930, prior to beginning her studies there, she had made several trips to Paris, where she became part of an enlightened community of black intellectuals from several different countries. Her encounters there with music and musicians, writers, students, artists, and activists served to...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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