For this week's installment of our Black History Month spotlights, we are introducing Shirley Graham Du Bois ’34. While a student at Oberlin College and Conservatory, Graham Du Bois became the first Black woman to write, compose, and stage an opera with an all-Black cast. "Tom-Tom: An Epic of Music of the Negro" premiered in the summer of 1932 at Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium and featured a cast of 500, a 21-foot waterfall, and a live elephant. Graham Du Bois collaborated with the community to put her historic production together; she recruited local church choirs to join the cast and held a contest for local students to design the set, with the winners receiving a $50 prize. "Tom-Tom"’s two performances in Cleveland attracted a crowd of over 25,000. After graduating from Oberlin, Graham Du Bois—who later married civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois—worked as a director, writer, and activist. She wrote and staged plays, published biographies, organized for the NAACP, and wrote for var...