Maya Angelou
went back to stay with their mother in St Louis.
Maya Angelou visits York College Feb 2013
by York College ISLGP is licensed under CC BY 2.0 (Cropped)
After four years living in Arkansas, the children
Maya Angelou was a writer, dancer, singer,
actor, director and civil rights activist. She
was born in America at the start of the Great
Depression and went on to become involved
in the country’s civil rights movement of
the 1950s and 60s. She was an influential
character in American social history.
Early Life
Angelou was born in 1928 in Missouri,
USA, to Vivian and Bailey Johnson. Named
Marguerite, she had an older brother, Bailey
Jnr, who nicknamed her Maya (because she
was ‘my-a sister’), and this name stuck with her
throughout her life.
When Angelou was three, her parents split
up and she and her brother went to live in
Arkansas with their paternal grandmother,
Annie Henderson, and their disabled uncle,
Willie. Mrs Henderson ran a business selling
hot meals to workers and eventually opened
a grocery store which flourished despite the
economic hardships of the Great Depression
and the Second World War. The town was
racially segregated and, as a black citizen,
Angelou experienced a lot of prejudice as she
was growing up.
This was a very dark time for Angelou; she
was abused by her mother’s boyfriend, who
was eventually jailed for the crime – but only
for one day. When he was released, he was
immediately murdered (allegedly by Angelou’s
uncles, in retaliation for what had happened
to her). Scarred by her experience, Angelou
stopped talking altogether for five years,
preferring instead to read and observe the
world around her. It was only at the age of
twelve that she began to speak again thanks to
the support of a family friend.
Angelou studied at George Washington High
School in San Francisco and won a scholarship
to study dance and drama at the San Francisco
Labor School (leaving briefly to take a job as
the city’s first ever African-American cable car
conductor). A few weeks after graduating from
high school, at the age of 17, she gave birth to
her son, Guy.
“My mother said I must always
be intolerant of ignorance but
understanding of illiteracy. That some
people, unable to go to school, were
more educated and more intelligent
than college professors.”
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Living as a single-mother, Angelou took on a
wide variety of jobs including working in a fast
food restaurant, in a mechanic’s shop and as
a dancer in a club. This was an experience she
later chronicled in Gather Together in My Name.
In 1951, Angelou married Tosh Angelos, a
former sailor and aspiring musician. They
worked together as dancers and moved briefly
to New York for a year so that Angelou could
study dance. During this time, Angelou started
using her childhood name Maya, coupled with
a form of her husband’s surname in order to
become Maya Angelou as she is known today.
Ultimately, the marriage was unsuccessful and
they separated in 1954.
Angelou continued to work as a dancer and
singer, touring Europe with a production of
Porgy and Bess and even releasing her own
album of calypso songs, titled Miss Calypso.
Africa
In 1960, while performing in a Jean Genet
play titled The Blacks, Angelou met Vusumzi
Make, a South African civil rights activist.
They moved to Cairo, together with Angelou’s
son, Guy. Angelou worked as the editor
of ‘The Arab Observer’, a weekly English
language publication. In 1962, she split
up with Make and she and her son moved
to Ghana, where Angelou worked on The
Ghanaian Times and The Africa Review. By now,
she could speak several languages in addition
to English: French, Italian, Arabic, Spanish and
Fanti (a West African language). During this
period, Guy was seriously hurt in a motoring
accident. Angelou stayed with him during his
recovery, but eventually left him in Africa when
she journeyed back to America in 1965.
Writing
In 1959, Angelou joined the Harlem Writers’
Guild at the urging of her friend, the novelist
John Killens. Although she left to live in Africa
shortly afterwards, on her return she re-joined
the group.
Writing Requirements
Angelou had strict requirements of the
environment in which she wrote: she
preferred it to be as austere as possible.
She described the ideal place to write as
‘a tiny, mean room with just a bed, and
sometimes, if I can find it, a face basin. I
keep a dictionary, a bible, a deck of cards
and a bottle of sherry in the room. I try
to get there around seven, and work until
around two in the afternoon.’
In 1969, thanks to the encouragement of the
writer James Baldwin and the editor Robert
Loomis, she published I Know Why the Caged
Bird Sings, an autobiography about the poverty
and racial inequality she experienced in her
childhood. It became the first non-fiction novel
by a black woman to become a best-seller but,
although internationally acclaimed, the book
was banned in many schools because it included
a graphic account of her childhood abuse.
“If you don’t like something,
change it. If you can’t change it,
change your attitude.”
Angelou went on to write six more volumes
of autobiography, Gather Together in My Name
(1974), Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like
Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981),
All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes (1986),
A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002) and Mom and
Me and Mom (2013). Although teeming with
frank, funny and thoughtful anecdotes about
her life, they are often vague – Angelou did not
like to be too specific about exact dates or facts
– for example, she never actually confirmed the
number of times she had been married.
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Angelou’s writing was not just confined to
autobiography; she was an acclaimed poet,
and in 1993 she was asked to write a poem
for Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration. She
was also an accomplished performer of her
own work; she won the Grammy Award for
Best Spoken Word Album on three occasions.
Possibly her most famous poem, Phenomenal
Woman, celebrates being a woman and defies
stereotypes of what women should be; it was
first published in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1978.
“I’ve learned that people will forget
what you said, people will forget what
you did, but people will never forget
how you made them feel.”
A prolific writer, Angelou also penned children’s
books, essays, cook books and plays. She wrote
the script and music for the 1972 film Georgia,
Georgia, making her the first black woman to
write a screenplay for a feature film. She was
nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and awarded
the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000 and the
Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2010. She
also received over 50 honorary degrees.
Later Life
In 1973, Angelou married Paul du Feu, a
Welsh carpenter, comic strip writer, and the
ex-husband of leading feminist Germaine
Greer. The pair met at a literary event and
their marriage lasted for eight years. In 1981,
Angelou became Reynolds Professor of
American Studies at Wake Forest University in
Northern Carolina, a post which she held for 33
years. She regularly gave lectures until well into
her 80s. In 2014, Angelou died peacefully at her
home in North Carolina, aged 86.
Civil Rights Activism
Angelou was a passionate human rights activist
and spent much of her life campaigning for
racial equality. In 1960 she met Martin Luther
King and was inspired to organise a Cabaret
for Freedom to raise money for the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a
civil rights group. In 1968, King asked Angelou
to organise a march for black rights, and
she was in the process of doing this when he
was assassinated on her 40th birthday. She
was distraught, and refused to celebrate her
birthday for many years afterwards, instead
sending a bouquet of flowers to King’s widow
every year. She attributed her determination
in writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in
part to his influence: ‘While I was writing it,
I thought about Dr Martin Luther King’s ability to
forgive and I began to forgive others and myself.’
“It’s one of the greatest gifts
you can give yourself, to forgive.
Forgive everybody.”
While living in Ghana, Angelou became friends
with the human rights activist Malcolm X, and
in 1965 she returned with him to the USA
to build a new civil rights group. This dream
was thwarted by his assassination shortly
after they arrived in the country. She was
devastated, and drifted for some time before
moving to New York in 1967, where she
met and became friends with the legendary
Rosa Parks. A decade before, Parks had
sparked an uprising after refusing to give
up her seat to a white person on a racially
segregated bus (she was consequently
arrested and became the figurehead for waves
of protests across America).
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Angelou was vocal in her support for the
part Parks played in both the fight for
racial equality and equality for women,
explaining, ‘we women are fortunate to scan
the generations and discover women who
dared to be “sheroes” and role models for
girls and young women. Madame Curie,
Harriet Tubman, Eleanor Roosevelt and
Mrs Rosa Parks have brightened our days
and influenced our thoughts. Because of their
courage and insight, we have come to believe
we can be the best and deserve the best.
Thanks to all of them.’
2012 at Elon University by Elon University is
licensed under CC BY 2.0 (Cropped)
TV and Film
A keen actress, dancer and singer, Angelou Angelou in Numbers
also appeared on TV and in film. She was
3 number of Grammy awards won
nominated for an Emmy award for her role
number of years she was
in the TV mini-series Roots in 1977, and she 5 electively mute
appeared alongside music stars Janet Jackson
and Tupac Shakur in the Oscar-nominated 7 volumes of her autobiography
romantic drama Poetic Justice in 1993. In 1995,
she starred alongside Winona Ryder in the
17 age at which her son was born
number of years as a
feature film How to Make an American Quilt. 33 university professor
Angelou also wrote and presented a ten-part
documentary series on the blues music genre 40 birthday on which Martin
and black African-American heritage, titled Luther King was assassinated
Blacks, Blues, Black!. In 1998, she directed a
86 age at her death
feature film, Down in the Delta.
Angelou was a good friend of the American
talk-show host Oprah Winfrey. On Angelou’s
death, Winfrey commented, ‘what stands out
to me most about Maya Angelou is not what
she has done or written or spoken; it’s how she
lived her life. She moved through the world with
unshakable calm, confidence and a fierce grace.’
“Try to be a rainbow in
someone’s cloud.”
‘I loved her, and I know she loved me. I will
profoundly miss her. She will always be the
rainbow in my clouds.’
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