Maya Angelou

Early life

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on 4 April 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. Her brother, Bailey Jr., gave her the nickname "Maya." After her parents divorced, the two children were sent to Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their grandmother, Annie Henderson.

In 1935, while staying with her mother in St. Louis, the young Marguerite was sexually assaulted by her mother's boyfriend. He was convicted and then found dead soon after his release. According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, she believed her voice had caused his death and stopped speaking for several years. She later moved to San Francisco and became the city's first Black cable car conductor. Her son, Guy, was born in 1944, shortly after she finished high school.

Performer and activist

Angelou first made her living as a dancer and singer. She toured Europe and Africa in 1954–55 with a State Department-sponsored production of Porgy and Bess and recorded the album Miss Calypso in 1957. Her professional name combined her brother's nickname with the surname of her brief husband, Tosh Angelos.

She also put her talents to work for civil rights. With the comedian Godfrey Cambridge she produced Cabaret for Freedom to raise money for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and at Martin Luther King Jr.'s request she became the SCLC's northern coordinator. Sources date this to 1959 or 1960. In the early 1960s she lived abroad, working as an editor at the Arab Observer in Cairo and then at the African Review in Accra, Ghana, where she also worked at the University of Ghana. In Ghana she met Malcolm X, and after returning to the United States she worked with him in the Organization of Afro-American Unity.

Writer

Encouraged by James Baldwin, Angelou wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), an account of her childhood, including her years in Stamps. It was nominated for a National Book Award and became the first of seven autobiographical books. Her poetry collection Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She wrote the screenplay and score for the film Georgia, Georgia, which the Encyclopedia of Arkansas describes as the first screenplay by an African American to be filmed; Wake Forest's papers date the film to 1972.

In 1993 she wrote and read "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's first inauguration.

Teacher and legacy

In the early 1980s Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, gave Angelou a lifetime appointment as its first Reynolds Professor of American Studies. She taught there for more than three decades. Her honors include the National Medal of Arts (2000), the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, a Grammy for spoken word, and more than fifty honorary degrees.

She died on 28 May 2014 in Winston-Salem, at 86. In 2022 she became the first Black woman to appear on a U.S. quarter.