Maya Angelou

Marguerite, before Maya

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on 4 April 1928. When she was three her parents divorced, and she and her older brother, Bailey Johnson Jr., were sent alone by train to Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, who ran the town’s Black general store. It was Bailey who called her “Maya,” and the name held.

Stamps was segregated in the ordinary, daily way of the 1930s South, and the store sat at the center of her childhood — the place where cotton pickers were weighed and paid, and where she learned to watch and to listen.

On a visit to her mother in St. Louis, at seven or eight, Angelou was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. After she testified, the man was found beaten to death, and the child concluded that her words had killed him. She stopped speaking, to almost everyone, for close to five years. A family friend named Bertha Flowers drew her back toward language by reading poetry aloud and insisting that a poem is not finished until it is spoken. The recovery of that voice is the story her whole life keeps retelling.

San Francisco: work and a son

In the early 1940s Angelou rejoined her mother, Vivian Baxter, in California. She studied dance and drama, and still in her teens she talked her way into a job as San Francisco’s first Black female streetcar conductor. Weeks after she finished high school in 1945, at seventeen, she gave birth to her son, Guy Johnson.

Guy was the fixed point of the decades that followed. The need to support him drove the run of jobs — cook, waitress, dancer — that she later set down in Gather Together in My Name, and his safety shaped nearly every move she made.

Becoming Maya Angelou

In the early 1950s she was dancing in San Francisco nightclubs, and at the Purple Onion she assembled the stage name that became her real one. She sang calypso, recorded the album Miss Calypso, and in 1954 and 1955 toured Europe as a dancer in a State Department production of Porgy and Bess.

It was her first sustained time outside the United States, and it changed her sense of what race and nationality meant. In Paris she performed and taught dance, and there she met James Baldwin — the beginning of one of the closest friendships of her life. Years later Baldwin would help move her from the stage toward the page.

New York: art becomes politics

By the end of the 1950s Angelou had settled into New York’s Black literary world. She joined the Harlem Writers Guild, acted in Jean Genet’s play The Blacks alongside James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson, and after hearing Martin Luther King Jr. speak, she and the comedian Godfrey Cambridge staged a revue, Cabaret for Freedom, to raise money for his Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The revue led to a job: for a time she served as the SCLC’s northern coordinator. Her activism was not a second career bolted onto the first. Performing, storytelling, and organizing were different uses of the same skill, holding a room.

Cairo and Ghana

In 1961 Angelou left the United States again, with the South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make and with Guy. They lived in Cairo, where she worked as an editor at the English-language Arab Observer, and then in Accra, where she wrote for Ghanaian newspapers and joined a community of Black American expatriates drawn to newly independent Ghana.

Soon after they arrived, Guy was badly hurt in a car accident and spent months recovering; Angelou stayed rather than leave him. It was in Ghana that she came to know Malcolm X, and there that her idea of Africa as an ancestral home met the harder fact that her history and her fight were still American.

Grief, and the turn to memoir

Angelou returned to the United States in 1965 to help Malcolm X build his new Organization of Afro-American Unity. Weeks later, on 21 February 1965, he was assassinated. Three years after that, Martin Luther King Jr., who had asked her to work for him again, was killed on 4 April 1968 — her fortieth birthday. For years afterward she did not celebrate the day.

James Baldwin and the Random House editor Robert Loomis pressed her to write. She resisted autobiography, then found its form: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1969, built from scene and dialogue with the architecture of a novel and closing with the birth of her son. It made her famous and opened a door for Black women’s life writing that had barely been ajar.

Memoirist, poet, and screen artist

Caged Bird became the first of seven autobiographies that carried her life forward volume by volume. Her poetry — Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Diiie, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and And Still I Rise (1978), with “Still I Rise” and “Phenomenal Woman” — drew its force from being spoken, out of Black musical and pulpit traditions.

She moved among forms without settling into one. She wrote for the screen, worked in film and television, and earned an Emmy nomination for her part in the 1977 miniseries Roots. The performer never left; she became the rhythm of the writer.

Teacher and national voice

In 1982 Wake Forest University named Angelou its first Reynolds Professor of American Studies, a post she held for the rest of her life, teaching poetry, race, and Shakespeare through performance and insisting that students defend a position out loud.

On 20 January 1993 she recited “On the Pulse of Morning” at Bill Clinton’s inauguration, the first poet to read at one since Robert Frost in 1961 and the first Black woman ever to do so. The child who had feared her own voice was now speaking for the country.

Angelou received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2011 and published a final memoir about her mother, Mom & Me & Mom, in 2013. She died at home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on 28 May 2014, at eighty-six. In 2022 she became the first Black woman depicted on a U.S. quarter. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, meanwhile, remains one of the most frequently challenged books in American schools.