A Journal of Research in Africana Studies
Freedom: Volume 2
Yolande Du Bois’s Scrapbooks: Sketching an Archival History
By Phillip Luke Sinitiere, Ph.D.
Senior Research Fellow, W.E.B. Du Bois Center, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Published in Freedom: Volume 2
Keywords
Yolande Du Bois, W.E.B. Du Bois, Archives, Scrapbooks, Harlem Renaissance
Abstract
In April 2023, the special collections department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst acquired eight of Yolande Du Bois’s scrapbooks (1900-1961). The scrapbooks document her life and that of her family between 1915 until 1929, showing her time as a teenager and high school student to that of a middle-aged Black professional woman. Across roughly six hundred pages, she includes never before seen photos of her father, W.E.B. Du Bois and her mother, Nina Gomer Du Bois. She curates carefully arranged artifacts from her years as a student at Fisk University between 1921 and 1924. She includes her writings and some of her artwork published in the 1920s in The Crisis and its children’s magazine, The Brownies’ Book, plus several unpublished poems and reflections about her high school teaching career in Baltimore. Additionally, Yolande Du Bois documents her two years at Columbia University, where she completed an MA in 1926. Two scrapbooks present her work in 1924-1925 as a summer counselor at Fern Rock, a New York City-area YWCA camp along with a trip to France, Switzerland, and England in the summer of 1927. The final scrapbook records her short-lived marriage to—and European honeymoon with—the queer Harlem Renaissance writer, Countee Cullen. This essay offers a research summary report on the scrapbooks, a sketch of their archival history, and provenance. It explains how the content of the scrapbooks complements and expands existing Du Bois scholarship because they uniquely present Yolande Du Bois in her own words through her own perspective as a student and writer. Through her creative endeavors the scrapbooks reveal an aesthetic autobiography of an unsung Harlem Renaissance visual and literary artist.
Digital Object Identifier
DOI: https://DOI.org/10.65373/KVMG8762