Graham served as music librarian while attending Howard University as a nonmatriculated student under the tutelage of Professor Roy W. Tibbs.

[6] In 1931, Graham entered Oberlin College as an advanced student and, after earning her BA in 1934, went on to do graduate work in music, completing a master's degree in 1935.

[7] In 1936, Hallie Flanagan appointed Graham director of the Chicago Negro Unit of the Federal Theater Project, part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration.

Elizabeth Dilling – a white-supremacist and staunch anti-communist – as well as Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, a Nazi sympathizer and anti-semite, sought to defund the Federal Theatre Project.

From 1940 to 1942, Graham worked at the Phillis Wheatley Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) in Indianapolis, Indiana, where she focused on establishing a theatre program and then became the director of the YMCA-USO group in Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

Dilling's publication of "Red Channels" ultimately launched anti-communist backlash against Graham Du Bois, resulting in her work being pulled from libraries and censored.

[9]: 12 In 1958, Graham Du Bois and her husband visited Ghana, where she spoke at the All-African Peoples' Conference (AAPC), an event held by 62 African National Liberation organizations where she delivered a speech titled "The Future of All-Africa lies in Socialism" where she stated "Africa, ancient Africa, has been called by the world and has lifted up her hands!

In 1960 the Du Boises attended a ceremony in the Republic of Ghana honoring Kwame Nkrumah as the first president of the newly liberated country.

[9]: 62 In 1967, she was forced to leave Ghana soon after the 1966 military-led coup d'état, and moved to Cairo, Egypt, where her surviving son David was working as a journalist.

[11] She gave talks at Yale and UCLA in 1970, where she was able to speak on imperialism, capitalism and colonialism and her experiences in countries undergoing socialist construction, such as China and Vietnam.

Her funeral was attended by many important political figures in China, including Cheng Yonggui, Deng Yingchao, and Huo Guofeng, where they honored her as a hero for her internationalism and selflessness.

The Communist Party Chairman lay a memorial wreath in honor of Graham Du Bois, as did the embassies of Tanzania, Ghana, and Zambia.

[13] Shirley Graham Du Bois died of breast cancer on March 27, 1977, aged 80, in Beijing, China,[14] and was buried at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery.

[15] Her alma mater Oberlin Conservatory of Music recently honored DuBois offering cluster courses and a conference devoted to reviving her remarkable legacy as a composer, activist and media figure.

The conference was called Intersections: Recovering the Genius of Shirley Graham Du Bois 2020 Symposium on Thursday and Friday, February 27 and 28, 2020, that included a plenary lecture by Columbia professor and author Farah Jasmine Griffin.

[7][20] According to the Oxford Companion to African-American Literature, her theatre works included Deep Rivers (1939), a musical; It's Morning (1940), a one-act tragedy about a slave mother who contemplates infanticide; I Gotta Home (1940), a one-act drama; Track Thirteen (1940), a comedy for radio and her only published play; Elijah's Raven (1941), a three-act comedy; and Dust to Earth (1941), a three-act tragedy.

Despite her unsuccessful attempts to land a Broadway production as many African-American women before and after her, her plays were still produced by Karamu Theatre in Cleveland and other major Black companies.

Other subjects included Frederick Douglass, Phillis Wheatley, and Booker T. Washington; as well as Gamal Abdul Nasser, and Julius Nyerere.