Maya Angelou

American poet and writer

• Born: April 4, 1928
• Birthplace: St. Louis, Missouri
• Died: May 28, 2014
• Place of death: Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Angelou, best known for her rhythmic, gospel-inspired poetry and candid autobiographical works, namely I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), professed a philosophy that spoke to women, especially Black women, facing seemingly insurmountable obstacles and challenges in life: “You may encounter many defeats but you must not be defeated.”

Early Life

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, to Vivian Baxter and Bailey Johnson. Following her parents’ divorce when she was three years old, Angelou and her brother were sent to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, in Stamps, a poor rural section of Arkansas. Angelou’s grandmother, whom she called Momma, was the stable force in Angelou’s early life. Annie was a strong, religious woman who made sure that the family went to church regularly. Religion and spiritual music were important factors in the Johnson family life. Angelou also enjoyed a close relationship with her brother, Bailey, who gave her the name Maya.

Angelou and her brother lived with their grandmother and Uncle Willie in the rear of the Johnson store, which Annie had owned for twenty-five years. Because the store was the center of activity for the local Black community, Angelou saw firsthand the indignities that Black residents suffered as a result of the prejudices of White people in Stamps.

Angelou faced a severely traumatic experience when she was just seven-and-a-half years old. During one of her visits to her mother in St. Louis, a boyfriend of Angelou’s mother raped her. When her mother’s brothers found out about the rape, they killed the man responsible. Believing that she had caused the man’s death by speaking his name, Angelou refused to speak for five years following these traumatic events. With the encouragement of Mrs. Flowers, an educated Black woman from Stamps, Angelou regained her speech. Under Flowers’s further guidance, Angelou began to read the works of William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Langston Hughes, and Paul Laurence Dunbar.

After graduating at the top of her eighth grade class in Stamps, she went to Los Angeles to pass the summer with her father, but after being attacked by his girlfriend, she lived for a month in a junkyard with runaways from many diverse backgrounds. The experience, she later wrote, deeply affected her views of race. Angelou and her brother continued their education in San Francisco, living with their mother. While still in high school, she worked as the first Black woman streetcar conductor in San Francisco.

At the age of seventeen, having just graduated from George Washington High School and unmarried, Angelou gave birth to her son, Guy Johnson. To support herself and Guy, she took jobs as a waitress, cook, and nightclub singer. In 1950, she married Tosh Angelos, a former sailor of Greek ancestry, but they were divorced after a few years. (Angelou’s surname was derived from that of her former husband.)

Angelou continued her early interest in music and dance by studying with Martha Graham. She went on to tour twenty-two countries during 1954 and 1955 as the premier dancer in Porgy and Bess. Her travels with the cast took her to Italy, France, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Egypt. During the late 1950s, Angelou and her son lived in a houseboat commune in California, where they went barefoot, wore jeans, and let their hair grow long. These experiences brought Angelou into contact with a variety of people from different countries and of different races.

As Angelou became interested in a writing career, she moved to New York in 1958 and joined the Harlem Writers Guild. In addition to working on her writing, she starred in the New York production of Jean Genet’s The Blacks (1960) with Godfrey Cambridge and collaborated with Cambridge to produce, direct, and star in Cabaret for Freedom (1960).

In 1960, Angelou and Guy moved to Cairo, Egypt, with a South African freedom fighter, Vusumzi Make. In Egypt, she served as an editor for Arab Observer, an English-language newspaper. Two years later, she and Guy moved to the West African nation of Ghana, where she worked for three years as a writer, as an assistant administrator for the University of Ghana, and as a feature editor for African Review.

Life’s Work

Angelou’s firsthand knowledge of the harmful effects of racism led her to political activism in the 1960s, working for civil rights and for a wider understanding of African American culture. In the 1960s, at the request of Martin Luther King Jr., Angelou served as the northern coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Her knowledge of Black traditions and cultures went beyond political activism as well. She produced Blacks, Blues, Black (1968) for National Educational Television, a ten-part series that explores African traditions in American life. Other television credits included Assignment America (1975), The Legacy (1976), The Inheritors (1976), and Trying to Make It Home (1988).

In the first volume of her now-classic autobiographical novel, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Angelou shares her experience of growing up as a poor Black female in the segregated rural South. The book is candid about issues of racism, sexism, child rape, sexuality, and other topics, and it remains a target of censors opposed to its explicitness and seeking to ban it from public schools and libraries. The book has been one of the most frequently challenged books in the United States, according to the American Library Association. Despite these challenges, Angelou continued to draw on her own experiences as the subject matter for her work throughout her career. She published five more volumes of her personal narrative, showing how she was able to overcome obstacles such as racism and sexism to achieve personal success.

In Gather Together in My Name (1974), Angelou writes about a difficult period in her life, a time when she was forced to work at menial jobs to support herself and her son. In Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976), Angelou describes her life as a dancer and actor, including her travels with the cast of Porgy and Bess. The next two volumes, The Heart of a Woman (1981) and All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), describe the rise of her career. A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002) concerns her return to the United States and involvement in the civil rights movement. Mom & Me & Mom (2013) is a biographical memoir detailing her complex relationship with her mother. Angelou told George Plimpton in an interview for the Paris Review that the prevailing theme running through the autobiographies is her love for her son; she also placed these works in the tradition of the slave narrative that extends back into the early nineteenth century.

An early exposure to spirituals and gospel music deeply influenced Angelou’s poetry, which displays a clear rhythm of gospel music and which reveals a woman whose faith sustained her in difficult times. She published several volumes of poetry: the Pulitzer Prize–nominated Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Diiie (1971), Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (1975, whose title came from a nineteenth-century spiritual) And Still I Rise (1978), Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? (1983), Now Sheba Sings the Song (1987), I Shall Not Be Moved (1990), A Brave and Startling Truth (1995), Amazing Peace (2005), Mother: A Cradle to Hold Me (2006), and Celebrations: Rituals of Peace and Prayer (2006).

Angelou began publishing books for children in 1986 with Mrs. Flowers: A Moment of Friendship, which is a selection from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Nine more followed, illustrated with drawings or photographs: Life Doesn’t Frighten Me (1993, an extended poem), Soul Looks Back in Wonder (1993, with others), My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken, and Me (1994), and Kobe and His Magic (1996). In 2004, she published Angelina of Italy, Izak of Lapland, Renee Marie of France, and Mikale of Hawaii.

The diversity of Angelou’s experiences and considerable talents led her into dance, theater, and film as well. As an actor, she is probably best known for her portrayal of Kunta Kinte’s grandmother in the television production of Alex Haley’s Roots (1977). She played the role of the grandmother in the 1993 television film There Are No Children Here. In addition to her acting career, she produced and directed for the stage and screen. She also wrote the screenplays for Georgia, Georgia (1972) and All Day Long (1974), and collaborated on the teleplay for Sister, Sister (1982). In 1995 she had a cameo role in How to Make an American Quilt, and in 1998, she directed her first film, Down in the Delta, making her the first African American woman to be a Hollywood director. She also appeared in the television version of Down in the Delta (1999), The Amen Corner (1999), and The Runaway (2000), and served as a host for the show Oprah & Friends on the AM Satellite Radio in 2006. The 2008 documentary The Black Candlefrom director M. K. Asante featured her narration and poetry.

Two volumes of essays appeared in the 1990s: Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993) and Even the Stars Look Lonesome (1997). According to The New Yorker writer Hilton Als, these works are collections of “homilies strung together with autobiographical texts” that stress Angelou’s inner journey. Also a collection of essays, Letter to My Daughter (2008) draws on Angelou's personal experiences and memories of the women in her family to provide advice to young women, the "daughter she never had."

In 2005, Angelou published her first cookbook, Hallelujah: The Welcome Table. A second, Great Food, All Day Long: Eat Joyfully, Eat Healthily, followed in 2011.

Angelou received many honors. Ladies’ Home Journal named her Woman of the Year in Communications in 1976. At the request of US president Bill Clinton, Angelou wrote and delivered the commemorative poem at his inauguration on January 20, 1993. This poem, “On the Pulse of Morning,” was later published by Random House and is perhaps her best-known work among American readers.

In addition to receiving more than fifty honorary doctorates, Angelou won several Grammy Awards for best spoken word or nonmusical album (1993, 1995, 2002), the National Association for the Advancement of Color People's Spingarn Medal (1994), North Carolina’s Woman of the Year Award from the Black Publishers Association (1997), the Humanitarian Contribution Award (1997), the Alston/Jones International Civil and Human Rights Award (1998), the Christopher Award (1998), and the National Medal of Arts (2000). In 1998, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, and in 2001, Ladies’ Home Journal named her among the thirty most powerful women in the nation. Angelou was the recipient of the Ford Theatre Lincoln Medal (2008), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2011), the National Book Foundation's Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community (2013), and the Norman Mailer Center Lifetime Achievement Award (2013). She also lent her name to Forsyth Medical Center's Maya Angelou Center for Women’s Health and Wellness, the Wake Forest University School of Medicine's Maya Angelou Center for Health Equity, and the Maya Angelou Public Charter School in Washington, DC. In 2022, she became the first Black woman to appear on the US quarter. The Maya Angelou Quarter, which depicted Angelou with outstretched arms and the image of a soaring bird behind her, was the first coin in the American Women Quarters Program.

Angelou also spent much of her career as a teacher, beginning with a lectureship at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1966. She was writer in residence at the University of Kansas in 1970 and distinguished visiting professor at Wake Forest University, Wichita State University, and California State University, Sacramento. Beginning in 1981, Angelou held a lifetime appointment as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest. During her travels abroad and through much study, Angelou became fluent in French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, and Fante, a West African language.

Angelou died on May 28, 2014, age eighty-six, at her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Significance

In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou evokes an authentic portrait of what it was like to be Black, poor, and female in the segregated South during the 1930s. In the autobiographical novel, she reveals herself as a strong, determined Black woman who overcomes adversities and emerges triumphant. These personal evocations, with their candor and sincerity, are Angelou’s legacy.

Angelou was consistent in producing a literature that spoke to other Black women who struggled to live their lives and to support their families, all while trying to maintain a positive outlook on life. As she matured as a writer, Angelou extended her message of hope and possibility to include all persons, regardless of race or color.

Bibliography

Angelou, Maya. The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou. New York: Modern Lib., 2004.

Angelou, Maya. "Maya Angelou on Courage and Creativity." Interview by Alison Beard. Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business School Publishing, 2 May 2013. Web. 23 Dec. 2013.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Maya Angelou. Philadelphia: Chelsea, 2009.

Braxton, Joanne M. Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1989.

Cud Joe, Selwyn. “Maya Angelou and the Autobiographical Statement.” Black Women Writers (1950-1980). Ed. Mari Evans. Garden City: Anchor, 1983.

Elliott, Jeffrey M., ed. Conversations with Maya Angelou. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1989.

Fox, Margalit. "Maya Angelou, Lyrical Witness of the Jim Crow South, Dies at 86." New York Times. New York Times, 28 May 2014. Web. 15 Sept. 2015.

Gillespie, Marcia Ann. "Why They Mattered: Maya Angelou, 1928–2014." Politico. Politico, 29 Dec. 2015. Web. 15 Sept. 2015.

Hilton, Als. “Songbird.” New Yorker 5 Aug. 2002: 72–76.

Lupton, Mary Jane. “Singing the Black Mother: Maya Angelou and Autobiographical Continuity.” Black American Literature Forum 24 (1990): 257–75.

"Maya Angelou." Academy of Achievement. American Academy of Achievement, 9 Apr. 2012. Web. 23 Dec. 2013.

"Maya Angelou." Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/maya-angelou. Accessed 24 Jan. 2022.

"Maya Angelou." Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/poet/maya-angelou. Accessed 24 Jan. 2022.

"Maya Angelou Quarter." US Mint, 6 Oct. 2021, www.usmint.gov/coins/coin-medal-programs/american-women-quarters/maya-angelou. Accessed 7 Mar. 2022.

Moore, Doug. "A Little House on Hickory Street, Birthplace of Maya Angelou, to Get Landmark Status." St. Louis Post-Dispatch. stltoday.com, 12 June 2015. Web. 15 Sept. 2015.

O’Neal, Sondra. “Reconstruction of the Composite Self: New Images of Black Women in Maya Angelou’s Continuing Autobiography.” Black Women Writers (1950-1980). Ed. Mari Evans. Garden City: Anchor, 1983.

Sachs, Andrea. "Maya Angelou's Lifetime of Influence." Time. Time, 22 Nov. 2013. Web. 23 Dec. 2013.

Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New ed. New York: Continuum, 1989.

Thursby, Jacqueline S. Critical Companion to Maya Angelou: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 2011.