No Subject Essay

Submitted By tamiatrust
Words: 652
Pages: 3

Shirley Graham Du Bois and her father, David Graham, had a very different relationship than what a usual father and daughter have. Shirley’s father David was a preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal church. Her father was a well-educated man who was the pastor at many different churches across the United States. As the daughter of a preacher she thought of him as: “The last of the old fashioned Negro preachers who was really the shepherd of his flock, who was totally devoted who would give his last coat away”. Shirley and her father’s relationship were very different from her mothers and it was much more complicated. Her father had a big influence on her. He instilled her into his own inquiring and imaginative mind. “…he instilled in me a very early age, a veneration of the Word, a kind of reverence for that which was recorded.” He taught her about the power of words and that powerful words would be like loaded pistols. She observed that even though she did not look up to her father they were alike in many ways. Shirley saw how her father put an influence on life by which she was a prolific writer and a voracious reader. The influence he put upon Shirley was that he wanted her to be powerful like him so he taught her about the different racial problems and that she should not be scared when Trust 2 there is something wrong. Also just as her father, she had a very creative mind. Yet, Shirley’s father had a different way raising her. Shirley’s father sometimes could play the role of her mother because he was such a powerful man. As a powerful man he raised his children in a very strict but religious manner. He felt that “No girls should marry under eighteen years of age”. He treated Shirley different because she was his only daughter and had to act as more of a maid than a sister to her younger brothers. Acting as a maid, she had to pick up the duties of doing all the household chores. Her father believed that:
“You are not prepared to marry until you have learned to keep house…….be sure to have his meals ready when he returns home in the evening.......the law of God is that you should remain single as long as your companion lives.” This was the factor that added to