Maya Angelou
/Born: April 4, 1928
Died: May 28, 2014
Life:
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. -Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri. Her parents split up when she was young, and she along with her brother Bailey, were sent to live with her paternal grandmother Anne Henderson. When she was seven, she visited her mother and was raped by her boyfriend. Angelou told her family and her uncles murdered the boyfriend. Traumatized by the event, Angelou took a vow of silence for five years, believing her voice had the power to kill. This life event was the basis for her autobiographical novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
In 1940, Angelou moved to San Francisco to live with her mother. She attended the California Labor School to study dance and acting. At the age of sixteen she became the first black woman cable car conductor in San Francisco. In 1951 she married Tosh Angelos, a Greek electrician, sailor, and aspiring musician. The coupled divorced in 1954 and Angelou kept her married name changing Angelos to the feminine Angelou.
Afterwards, she danced professionally and set off a career in theatre. In 1959 she moved to New York City at the urging of John Oliver Killens. She joined the Harlem Writer's Guild where she met other writers and published her work. After meeting Martin Luther King Jr in 1960, she became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Northern Coordinator.
Angelou spent much of the 1960's in Egypt and Ghana. Growing close to the African-American expatriate community, she met Malcom X and returned to the States to help him organize a new civil rights group. The group disbanded shortly after Malcom X's assassination. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr asked Angelou to help organize a march. Dr. King was assassination on Angelou's fortieth birthday and she was so distraught, she stopped celebrating her birthday for several years.
In 1972, her screenplay Georgia, Georgia was produced by a Swedish film company. It was the first screenplay written by a black woman. She also had a supporting role on the TV mini-series Roots and received many awards during this period. Including over thirty honorary degrees. She met Oprah Winfrey in the late 70's and the two formed a close friendship.
In 1981 she accepted the Reynolds Professorship of American Studies at Wake Forest University. Angelou once said that, "I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes. But I had to work at Wake Forest to know that.” She devoted the rest of her life to teaching at Wake Forest.
At Bill Clinton's inauguration she wrote and read her poem, "On the pulse of the morning." This made her the first poet since Robert Frost to read at an inauguration. She achieved a life-long dream of directing her own film with the production of Down in the Delta. She died on May 28, 2014.
Angelou lived a long and vibrant life. She was a talented singer, dancer, writer, poet, civil rights activist, and teacher. A single biography can't encompass all the struggles, triumphs, joys, and achievements of this remarkable woman.