Celebrating Black History Month: André De Shields Honors W.E.B. Du Bois

In honor of Black History Month, Broadway.com is celebrating some of the theater industry’s most influential Black artists. We invited actors who are currently (or soon-to-be) on Broadway to tell us about the individuals who most inspire them. Each week in February will feature a new entry in the series, with Broadway stars honoring their colleagues, mentors and the historic figures they admire.

First up is the one and only André De Shields, who returns to Broadway this spring as Old Deuteronomy in Cats: The Jellicle Ball, a drag and ball culture-inspired take on Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical. De Shields chose to speak about the legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois as well as the symbolic importance of the West African Sankofa bird.

“I don’t believe that history repeats itself,” posits the Tony-winning theater legend, “but I do think that we are at an intersection of evolution and history that we really must learn from.” These are wise words from a man who knows something about history. We are, of course, talking about the original Wiz and Hermes in Hadestown, not to mention his role as patriarch Willy Loman in the 2022 revival of Death of a Salesman, which featured the first Black Loman family on Broadway. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! Speaking on his place within a tapestry of trailblazers, Shields invokes the Southeast African term “Ubuntu,” which means, “I am because you are.”

“There's a mythological bird in the African culture. It's called the Sankofa bird. It's unique because it doesn't fly. It walks. It consistently goes in a forward motion, but occasionally the Sankofa bird can turn its head and look in the opposite direction of where it's headed. The lesson being, how could you possibly know where you are going if you don't know where you've been? That is what February Black History Month is all about,” says Shields.

The highly-decorated performer took this opportunity to praise W.E.B. Du Bois, the prolific writer, sociologist and civil rights activist. “He's one of our first social, political and cultural geniuses. One of the first Black men who graduated from Harvard University. Because his most important work was done at the turn of the 20th century, he is a living interpretation of the Sankofa bird.”

“In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois said, 'The crisis of the 20th century is the crisis of the color line,'" adds Shields. “Now here we are in the 21st century and that still rings true.”

With this in mind, Shields stresses the importance of maintaining historical perspective: “As we continue to move forward and continue to remember where we had been, where we are coming from, we will put a lock and key on regression.”