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Yolande Du Bois (1900-1961) often resides in the towering shadow of her father, the radical civil rights intellectual and activist W. E. B. Du Bois (1868- 1963). She was his only daughter, his only child to survive into adulthood and is often remembered primarily for her brief marriage to the queer Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen (1903-1946). The overwhelming impression left by the existing biographical record is that Yolande Du Bois was a person upon whom history acted rather than an important historical contributor in her own right.

Drawing from recently discovered scrapbooks of Yolande’s that date to the 1920s and 1930s—the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance—this presentation will use the photos, inscriptions, and other mementos found in her notebooks to unveil a person who documented and asserted her own historical agency. In other words, the scrapbooks reveal artistic snapshots of Yolande’s own life on her own terms in her own voice. While the lecture will show how Yolande’s scrapbooking fits into a longer tradition of African American cultural history, it will also document how magazines like The Crisis and The Brownies’ Book featured the creative fruits of her artistic imagination on their covers and within their pages.

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Phillip Luke Sinitiere (pronounced Sin-uh-tare) received a Ph.D. in American history at the University of Houston in 2009. Currently, he is a professor of history and humanities at the College of Biblical Studies, a predominately African American school located in Houston’s Mahatma Gandhi District. In addition, Sinitiere is the scholar in residence at UMass Amherst’s W. E. B. Du Bois Center. He also serves on the editorial board of Global Black Thought, a brand-new peer reviewed journal launched by the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). A scholar of American religious history and African American Studies, Sinitiere’s latest book is Forging Freedom in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Twilight Years: No Deed but Memory (University Press of Mississippi, 2023). At present, he is finishing a book on the history of W. E. B. Du Bois’s archives (under contract with UMass Press), and a scholarly essay volume on the work of Shirley Graham Du Bois (under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press).