Nina Yolande Du Bois (October 21, 1900 – March 1961), known as Yolande Du Bois, 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
Bois was born on October 21, 1900, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, her father's hometown, to W.E.B. and Nina (née Gomer) Du Bois. They had arrived there from Atlanta, Georgia, shortly after the death of their infant son Burghardt from diphtheria in 1899. When Yolande was growing up, she did not have a close relationship with her father. He was often away for his career, or living in a different city altogether for academic research and assignments. 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. As a child, Yolande was defiant toward her parents. She was aggressive and passionate in nature. Her father described their relationship as one in which she held the power. To gain some control, her parents sent her to Bedales, a British boarding school. While dealing with racial discrimination, she graduated from Brooklyn's Girls' High School.
Du Bois began attending Fisk University in 1920. In her sophomore year she fell ill, and spent the entire month of February in the hospital due to serious inflammation of the gums. While in college, Yolande was in a loving romance with jazz musician Jimmie Lunceford. However, her father believed he was an unsuitable match. Defying her parents' wishes, she continued to see Lunceford for some time. 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.
She graduated from Fisk and started teaching in Baltimore, Maryland at a public high school.
Marriage and family
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).<ref>{ { Cite book|title=Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity|publisher=North Carolina Press|year=2004|isbn=0807855197|location=Chapel Hill|pages=188|oclc=57706672}}</ref> 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 Du Bois 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. In June 1928 Countee, his father and Jackman traveled together to Paris, as Countee had received a Guggenheim Fellowship for study in Europe. Yolande joined him in August. By September 1928, her father was counseling Cullen on maintaining the marriage. After Cullen admitted to Yolande that he was attracted to men, she filed for divorce. Like the wedding, the divorce was negotiated between Cullen and Yolande's father; it became final in Paris in the spring of 1930. (Countee married again in 1940 and stayed married until his death several years later.)