[5] Yolande was often ill. A family physician diagnosed the girl as having "inadequate levels of lime" when she had poor health.

In her sophomore year she fell ill, and spent the entire month of February in the hospital due to serious inflammation of the gums.

The relationship ended when she conceded to her father's wish that she marry poet Countee Cullen, who had received early acclaim in his career.

Du Bois first met Countee Cullen in 1923, when they were both students in college, she at Fisk and he at New York University (NYU).

[7] She married him on April 9, 1928, at Salem Methodist Episcopal Church in Harlem, in a wedding officiated by his adoptive father, Frederick A. Cullen, a minister.

Du Bois pressured Countee to pick up the marriage certificate early to prevent any problems or delays; he acquired it four days before the ceremony.

[8][9] After the wedding Yolande and Countee visited Philadelphia, Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Great Barrington, Massachusetts in a brief honeymoon.

[6] While teaching, she met Arnette Franklin Williams, who had begun attending a night school held at Dunbar.

[11] Du Bois and her mother moved to New York City, where she began taking classes at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

[6] Yolande Du Bois Williams returned to Baltimore, where she worked as a teacher and reared her daughter.

Yolande's daughter, Du Bois Williams, married Arthur Edward McFarlane, Sr., and had a son, the first male born in the Du Bois family since Burghardt in 1897 (that child had died tragically at 18 months of age and was the topic of a chapter in W.E.B.

At Du Bois' 90th birthday party in New York City, his speech was addressed to his great-grandson, Arthur.

Yolande Du Bois Williams died in Baltimore of a heart attack in March 1961.

[3] Yolande was buried in the Mahaiwe Cemetery at Great Barrington, Massachusetts, her father's hometown, beside her mother, Nina Du Bois, and brother Burghardt, who had died as an infant.

[10] Williams' grandson, Arthur E. McFarlane II, arranged to install a headstone at her grave in Great Barrington in 2014.

[3] After Yolande's death, her father accepted an invitation from Kwame Nkrumah to go to Ghana, where he worked on his proposed Encyclopedia Africana.