Maya Angelou at the memorial service for Odetta, February 4, 2009
Photo by Frank Beacham
Maya Angelou was born 93 years ago today.
A poet and novelist, Angelou was born as Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis. Her parents divorced when she was three, and she and her brother went to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. When she was eight, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. When she revealed what happened, her uncles kicked the culprit to death.
Frightened by the power of her own tongue, Angelou chose not to speak for the next five years. From this quiet beginning emerged a young woman who sang, danced and recorded poetry. After moving to San Francisco with her mother and brother in 1940, Angelou began taking dance lessons, eventually auditioning for professional theater.
However, her plans were put on hold when she had a son at age 16. She moved to San Diego, worked as a nightclub waitress, tangled with drugs and prostitution and danced in a strip club. Ironically, the strip club saved her career: She was discovered there by a theater group.
She auditioned for an international tour of Porgy and Bess and won a role. From 1954 to ’55, she toured 22 countries.
In 1959, she moved to New York, became friends with prominent Harlem writers and got involved with the civil rights movement. In 1961, she moved to Egypt with a boyfriend and edited for the Arab Observer.
After leaving her boyfriend, she headed to Ghana, where a car accident severely injured her son. While caring for him in Ghana, she took a job at the African Review, where she stayed for several years.
Her writing and personal development flourished under the African cultural renaissance that was taking place.
When she returned to the U.S., she began publishing her multivolume autobiography, starting with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Four more volumes appeared during the next two decades, as well as several books of poetry.
In 1981, Angelou was appointed Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem.
Angelou died on the morning of May 28, 2014. She was found by her nurse.
Although Angelou had reportedly been in poor health and had canceled recent scheduled appearances, she was working on another book, an autobiography about her experiences with national and world leaders.
During her memorial service at Wake Forest University, her son, Guy Johnson, stated that despite being in constant pain due to her dancing career and respiratory failure, she wrote four books during the last ten years of her life. He said, "She left this mortal plane with no loss of acuity and no loss in comprehension.”
In 2015, a United States Postal Service stamp was issued commemorating Maya Angelou with the Joan Walsh Anglund quote "A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song,” though the stamp mistakenly attributes the quote to Angelou. The quote is from Anglund's book of poem, A Cup of Sun (1967).