Discovering Africa in the United States: Shirley Graham Du Bois and Representations of Africa in Tom-Tom

In the spring of 1929, Shirley Graham Du Bois undertook the tasks to represent Africa on the global stage and educate and inform American masses who, until then, had generally only ever come into contact with the continent through racial stereotypes popularized through the entertainment business, media images, and stories. The climactic three act opera, Tom-Tom: An Epic of Music and the Negro, had its humble beginnings at Morgan University where Graham Du Bois had taught in the late 1920s. The show had at that point been produced only as a one-act play with music by Graham Du Bois. She was accustomed to producing pageants and plays at Morgan State but she, unknowingly or not, devised and composed Tom-Tom with a larger vision in mind. Although she could not have foreseen her later development of the play into a full-scale opera, engaging thousands of spectators at the immensely elaborate Cleveland Stadium, one must be careful not to underestimate her gargantuan and calculated intentions. The enigmatic opera Tom-Tom offers powerful insight into how Shirley Graham Du Bois viewed the evolution of African American identity through the lens of the diaspora of African culture.

Graham Du Bois  often centered her research on the African American experience. In a 1954 speech to the Women’s Evening Guild of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn, New York, Graham Du Bois mentioned her early involvement in developing knowledge of African American contributions in America, saying,

This drive to invest time and energy to understand the origins of the country’s newest civilian population was prevalent throughout Graham Du Bois' entire life, and manifested itself in a myriad of ways all under the title of racial uplift. This ideology was carried throughout her life’s work. 

In 1931, Graham Du Bois was contacted by Lawrence Higgins—producer for the Stadium Opera Company in Cleveland—who asked her to rewrite Tom-Tom as a full-length opera for their second gala season in the summer of 1932. Graham Du Bois reached out to an Oberlin alumnus and contemporary, Rowena Jelliffe, who had, along with her husband, founded the Karamu House in Cleveland, an African-American Theater dedicated to promoting African-American artists and supporting interracial harmony. Graham Du Bois contacted Jelliffe about producing her then one-act play at the Karamu House. Although Karamu House went on to produce plays of hers such as Coal Dust (1939) and I Gotta Home (1940), she was initially turned down for Tom-Tom. Later, however, Lawrence Higgins reached out to Karamu House inquiring whether a black composer had ever written a serious “black opera.” Jelliffe referred him to Graham Du Bois' Tom-Tom and he followed up with her. He commissioned Graham Du Bois to rewrite the play into into a fully-devised, three-act opera that eventually employing an all-black ensemble of 500 performers. Graham Du Bois immediately set to work, took temporary leave of Oberlin and locked herself in a small room with a piano to further develop Tom-Tom for the operatic stage.  

Tom-Tom: Intellectual Inspiration 
Graham Du Bois was constantly driven to research and uncover more about Africa, a continent which was grossly misrepresented and erased in the wake of white western thought and systems of oppression. With her brother Lorenz, she co-wrote an undated short story titled "Kawo: A Story of Africa". Later she wrote a lengthy paper at Oberlin titled “West African Survivals in the Vocabulary of Gullah” in which she dealt with the evolution of West African language in the Americas and denoted pages worth of carefully typed categories of West African names, meanings, and their Gullah counterparts. (Gullah is a Creole language that was established by black people who settled in South Carolina and neighboring islands). Graham Du Bois' master's thesis at Oberlin College and Conservatory on the African roots of American music further reflects her interests in a deeper understanding of the African continent, and possibly her personal connection to her African ancestry. Beyond this, Graham Du Bois wanted to unearth and give weight to underprivileged and often erased identities in the black community. It is not a stretch, therefore, to recognize her intrigue and involvement in the Pan-Africanist movement of the time that gripped many black communities globally. Seeds of this concept and discourse of Africa were planted in Graham Du Bois' experience at the Sorbonne in France, where she was exposed to many different African diasporic communities and contemporary ideologies.

The opportunity to present an 'authentic’ Africa upon the American stage was a driving force for Graham Du Bois' indelible work ethic and intense motivation to literally perform racial uplift in the eyes of blacks and whites alike. Graham Du Bois utilized all the knowledge and tools she had gained thus far to create this reality through Tom-Tom. In the program notes for the opera, Graham Du Bois describes the influences family had upon her conception of the unique musicality of the piece. Her father, uncle, and brother alike had all traveled to Liberia to establish and teach at an underprivileged school, where they learned and picked up rich melodies from Liberian citizens. Her brother sang them to her upon his return, and they sounded “much more familiar than the popular songs I heard all around.”  Graham Du Bois also mentions the strong influence her father, a minister, had upon her as he instilled in her “a deep love and reverence for the spirituals." Graham Du Bois portrayed the scope and evolution of African music and experience through the diaspora of Africans to America with the use o rhythms derived from African tradition, black spirituals of America, and new innovative forms of black music such as jazz and blues of the era.

Tom-Tom became the first opera its kind, both in structure and content, that sought to expose racialized stereotypes and celebrate the contributions of African culture and people to the world at large. However, the opera simultaneously plays into these stereotypes; it contains charged imagery and prevailing representations of Africa that can be viewed as problematic. Critics at the time described Tom-Tom as being “primeval,” consisting of “bare instincts,” and relying on certain accepted tropes of Africa as existing in the “jungle” and performing uncivilized rites of “sacrifice." Some of these reactions are an expression of the time in which Graham Du Bois lived, but others are grounded in aspects of the opera as portrayed narratively and visually along dominant norms of exoticism. 

Certain black performers and critics held issue with Graham Du Bois' envisioning of an ‘authentic’ Africa. There was communal backlash when, in the third act Graham Du Bois used the derogatory term ‘nigger’ in dialogue. An account from a few black, female performers in Tom-Tom reveals their protest against the artistic desire to present them in scantily-clad clothing with nothing covering their chests. One critic went so far as to suggest that this opera “was acceptable to whites and. . . reinforced their belief that Blacks were ‘exotic’ and ‘primitive’.” The opera’s design definitely had commonalities with pejorative representations of an essentialist African experience as exotic depicted on the stage by white performers such as Ruth St. Denis and other commercialized American entertainment. Therefore it cannot be ignored that Tom-Tom is problematic in the way that it portrays African experience as primitive as compared to its more westernized African American counterparts, and that there may be undercurrent value judgements placed on the evolution of Africans into a more ‘civilized’ eurocentric people.

The 1930s was not a time to introduce the American public to nuanced development/representation/depictions of African Americans; it was a time to fight back using the tools of the imperialists against them. The value Graham Du Bois placed on eurocentric culture as a means to uplift black culture would today be problematic, and was even seen this way by black people of the mid 20th century.

While alluring, exoticized performances of non-eurocentric cultures that focused on imitating the ‘other’ were largely carried out by white performers and catered to a white audience. Graham Du Bois' vision incorporated black individuals as imperative to relaying the Africanist experience to a diverse audience. She insisted on hiring an all-black cast and orchestra to perform her vision—to such an extent that in a letter from a friend she was accused of taking this ideal all too seriously and was encouraged to hire a few white horn players to balance out the sound. Needless to say, Graham Du Bois did not comply. Another important detail to consider is sheer accessibility. In a review by the Cleveland News, ticket prices for the Stadium Opera are described as “$1 top for boxes, with the whole lower floor at 50 cents, and the upper level at 25 cents, unheard of prices for such an entertainment offering anywhere,” adding that Tom-Tom drew “the largest audience of the past week’s operatic festival.” These technicalities and descriptions contribute to our understanding of Graham Du Bois' intentions and goals in the creation of Tom-Tom. Staging and economic accessibility drew a more marginalized demographic of black and lower class populations to the generally inaccessibly expensive theater. Importantly, Graham Du Bois' audience included the African American public along with a broader conjoining of white and black communities. She sought, however, to educate especially those African Americans who had been given little to no information or affirmative images of Africa to ground and weave their own histories and identities “in search of the most effective voice for articulating the distinct heritage of African Americans.”