Nina Yolande Du Bois

Nina Yolande Du Bois (October 21, 1900 – March 1961) was an American teacher known for her involvement in the Harlem Renaissance. She was the daughter of W.E.B. Du Bois and the former Nina Gomer. Her father encouraged her marriage to Countee Cullen, a nationally known poet of the Harlem Renaissance. They divorced within two years. She married again and had a daughter, Du Bois's only grandchild. That marriage also ended in divorce.

Du Bois graduated from Fisk University and later earned an MA from Columbia University. She worked as a teacher, primarily in Baltimore, Maryland.

Early life Du Bois was born on October 21, 1900, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, They had arrived there from Atlanta, Georgia, shortly after the death of their infant son Burghardt from diphtheria in 1899. Yolande was often ill. A family physician diagnosed the girl as having "inadequate levels of lime" when she had poor health. Some biographers thought that Yolande faked these illnesses to gain her father's attention. While dealing with racial discrimination, she graduated from Brooklyn's Girls' High School. 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. Countee’s close friend, Harold Jackman, had introduced the pair to each other, likely at the Jersey Shore where Countee's parents had a house in Pleasantville. With the approval of Yolande's father, Countee proposed during the holiday season of 1927.

He and her father spent the next couple of months planning the wedding with little contribution from Yolande. The April 9th wedding became the social event of the year, a highlight among the black elite. The public African-American press published every detail of the wedding, including the rail car used and the number of people in the wedding party. 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. Some 1,200 people from Du Bois' wide political and activist circle were invited to the wedding, but 3,000 people crowded into the church for the ceremony. Yolande had 16 bridesmaids and Cullen had 9 groomsmen. Jackman served as the best man.

After the wedding Yolande and Countee visited Philadelphia, Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Great Barrington, Massachusetts in a brief honeymoon. During the honeymoon, Yolande wrote to her father, saying that she was unsure about her marriage and her intimate relationship with her husband. Her father responded that she simply needed more experience. After she was well, she returned to her teaching position. She took a job at Dunbar High School, teaching both English and history.

Du Bois and her mother moved to New York City, where she began taking classes at Columbia University’s Teachers College. She earned a master's degree from Columbia and returned to teaching in Baltimore. Her divorce from Williams was final in 1936. 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. Williams' grandson, Arthur E. McFarlane II, arranged to install a headstone at her grave in Great Barrington in 2014. That year was also the occasion of dedication of a new interpretive trail at the W.E.B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite, a National Historic Landmark in the city.

After Yolande's death, her father accepted an invitation from Kwame Nkrumah to go to Ghana, where he worked on his proposed Encyclopedia Africana. He was unable to complete it before his death there in 1963. He was buried in Ghana. His second wife, the writer and activist Shirley Graham Du Bois, was also buried there, years later.

Yolande Du Bois Williams, W. E. B. Du Bois' only granddaughter, married to Howard Irvin and became known as Yolande Du Bois Irvin. She attended Fisk University and then New York University to get her bachelor's degree, and earned a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Colorado. She joined the psychology faculty of Xavier University of Louisiana in 1988 and taught there until her retirement. She died on November 15, 2021, at age 89 and was survived by three of her four children and their descendants. She was buried in Great Barrington alongside her mother and other Du Bois family members.