Eight Forgotten Scrapbooks, an Archival Miracle, and a Life Brought Out of the Shadows
by Adam Holmes, Assistant Director, W. E. B. Du Bois Center, and Caroline J. White, Outreach Archivist and Public Services Coordinator, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center
Several times a week, staff in the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center (SCUA) receive emails from the public offering materials, and often these inquiries lead to satisfying acquisitions: additions to the University Archives, a new collection on social change, etc. Occasionally, they reveal a surprising treasure that not only complements but also augments and deepens existing collections—and what we know about the people represented in them.
In the spring of 2023, then SCUA head Aaron Rubinstein ’01 received an email from Brody Drake, a man in Texas who had in his possession some items he thought might be of interest to the department. He explained that he had purchased a storage unit in Portland, Texas, at auction; the unit had been declared abandoned. While cleaning it out, he found several scrapbooks containing photographs, ephemera, drawings, and striking hand-drawn decorations. Wondering about their significance and value, he began researching the names he found in them—Du Bois, Yolande—and then set about tracking down people who might be connected to them. Ultimately, he made contact with SCUA, home of the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers and several Du Bois-related collections.
Archives are popularly thought to contain secrets, there to be uncovered: if you want to know the truth about something, you can find it in the archives. Archivists themselves both bristle at and sometimes, unwittingly, perpetuate these ideas. Archives can seem mysterious, but that may be in part because they are held behind locked doors, in private spaces to which the public does not have access, and you can’t use any archival materials without the archivist’s assistance—or, some might say, permission. There are certainly archival collections that reveal new information, either because they haven’t been seen in a long time or because someone has asked new questions about them that haven’t been asked before. But rather than thinking about secrets or absolute truths, archivists are most comfortable in the realm of evidence: clues and information that can be put together to reconstruct something that happened and how it happened. When trying to understand more about the scrapbooks, we have to look at the evidence.
But how did these scrapbooks—eight of them!—come to be left in a storage unit in South Texas, and how long had they been there?
Phillip Luke Sinitiere, the W. E. B. Du Bois Center’s Senior Research Fellow, has used biographical information about Yolande Du Bois, as well as her daughter Du Bois Williams, to piece together the likely journey that brought the scrapbooks to Texas. He believes that Yolande kept the scrapbooks with her at her home in Baltimore, where she worked as an educator, from the 1920s until her death in 1961. Du Bois Williams inherited them from her late mother and brought the books with her to the Bronx in New York, then out west to Denver, where she lived in the 1960s, and finally to South Texas, where she moved in the mid-1970s. It was around this point that Williams put the books in storage, and there they remained until 2023.
“It is stunning,” says Sinitiere, “to realize that these scrapbooks lived in South Texas for nearly half a century from the mid-1970s to early 2023. Think about that: this means they lived in a very humid environment along the Gulf Coast for fifty years. This means that they survived hurricanes and tropical storms during the summer months. This means that they experienced freezing temperatures when Canadian winter blasts broke through the jet stream bringing frigid air into South Texas. These scrapbooks survived environmental extremes, exacerbated by climate change, which explains their precarious physical condition.”
Professor Whitney Battle-Baptiste, director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Center, believes that the improbable origin story of these scrapbooks only adds to their appeal.
“I feel like having the stories attached to these materials brings them to life and shows us how personal memories and private experiences add to the significance of these archival artifacts,” she says. “As an archaeologist, I yearn for a story that helps me to understand a little bit more about where things come from.” Battle-Baptiste has no doubts about the value of archival materials such as these to scholars and educators alike. “The interest of scholars in using our collections has grown significantly during my time as director,” she says.
The scrapbooks provide both a direct window into and an opportunity to revisit the life of a historical figure who has hitherto been overshadowed, if not entirely forgotten. Being W. E. B. Du Bois’s daughter was not easy for Yolande Du Bois (1900-1961). Her father, aside from being one of the leading lights of the intellectual and activist culture of this country for the entirety of her life, was an exacting and often critical figure. He made patriarchal and problematic decisions about his daughter’s life such as pressuring her into marriage to the poet Countee Cullen, who everyone (except Du Bois, it would seem) knew was gay. (The wedding was lavish; the marriage failed.) In letters, Du Bois frequently critiqued his daughter’s choices and lifestyle, failing to recognize that these were in large part borne out of pain that he had done little to prevent and much to exacerbate. In light of this, it is somewhat poignant to note that as a teenage girl Yolande would often sign her letters to her father as “Ouch.”
Both W. E. B. and Nina Du Bois were traumatized by the death of their first child, Burghardt, in 1899. Nina remained a melancholy and withdrawn character for the remainder of her days, and it is said that even in his 90s, W. E. B. Du Bois would choke up when remembering Burghardt. One can detect the pall of grief that hangs over the Du Bois family while perusing the scrapbooks. Yolande wrote a poem while standing by Burghardt’s grave in Great Barrington, Mass., reflecting on her relationship to the brother she never met. Until the scrapbooks were opened, nobody living knew this poem existed.
Even so, the scrapbooks also document the joy and creativity in Yolande’s life. Her parents are shown in (never before seen) photographs enjoying their time as a family whether at home or on vacation. The family dogs, hitherto only known from glancing references in archival correspondence, are pictured, and so too are many of Yolande’s friends from school and beyond. Nina, who rarely smiled in photographs, appears in the scrapbooks with a grin on her face, while W. E. B. Du Bois, who was almost never seen in anything but a three-piece suit, is shown reclining on a beach in a delightfully old-fashioned bathing costume.
Yolande’s identity as an artist is perhaps the greatest finding to emerge from these scrapbooks and the subject of a recent article by Phil Sinitiere, “Yolande Du Bois’s Scrapbooks: Sketching an Archival History,” published in the Summer 2025 issue of Freedom: A Journal of Research in Africana Studies. The sketches, designs, silhouettes, and illustrations found throughout the scrapbooks show a vivid artistic mind at work. They also reveal that she was far more involved in her father’s work than was known up to this point. In fact, by studying old copies of The Crisis magazine, as well as other publications, alongside the art in the scrapbooks, one can see that Du Bois often included his daughter’s work in his publications. This support for her artistic career presents a positive counterpoint to some of his shortcomings as a father. Furthermore, as Sinitiere says, “the undeniable point here is that the scrapbooks provide evidence showing Yolande Du Bois’s work as a Harlem Renaissance visual and literary artist. Let’s repeat that: Yolande Du Bois was a literary and visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance.”
“The archive is a place of discovery,” says Battle-Baptiste, and these scrapbooks contain a host of new information, context, and personality, opening new avenues for discovery. Alongside other collections related to W. E. B. Du Bois, they help flesh out a fuller picture of his glittering life. More significantly, they will shine a light on a figure who for too long has languished in obscurity or been dismissed as a minor character—but who led her own full, creative, complex life: Yolande Du Bois.