Shirley Graham Du Bois, Claudia Jones, and the Liberatory Potential of Peace

Abstract W.E.B. Du Bois’s peace crusade was influenced by his second wife Shirley Graham and their friend Claudia Jones. Both Graham Du Bois and Jones understood that peace was a prerequisite to global emancipation and that war and militarism affected the most vulnerable; only by securing peace would the most oppressed be liberated. By the time of Du Bois’s arrest and trial chronicled in In Battle For Peace, Jones was also under indictment for her peace work. She had long articulated an emancipatory ethos that recognized Black women as the most vulnerable population, and she theorized that peace was necessary to their liberation. Graham Du Bois articulated the same in her letters and work during the peace movement. Both women argued that war and militarism were an attack on the Black home and that women were the most susceptible to the exploitative labor conditions and violence that predominated in military societies. While scholars have often dismissed this focus on gender and home as maternalist; Jones and Graham Du Bois recognized that the home was the site of revolutionary potential and socialist transformation, and they were instrumental in influencing Du Bois’s own peace commitments. The personal was not just political; the personal was the site for socialist liberation and all three believed that socialism could secure peace and equality.