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Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. Her parents divorced when she was only three and she was sent with her brother Bailey to live with their grandmother in the small town of Stamps, Arkansas. In Stamps, Maya experienced the racial discrimination that was the legally enforced way of life in the American South, but she also absorbed the deep religious faith and old-fashioned courtesy of traditional African American life.

Maya Angelou credits her grandmother and her extended family with instilling in her the values that informed her later life and career. She enjoyed a close relationship with her brother, who gave her the nickname Maya when they were very young.

THE EARLY YEARS:

SEXUALLY MOLESTED, SCHOOL DROP-OUT,

& A SINGLE MOTHER AT 16

At age seven, while visiting her mother in Chicago, she was sexually molested by her mother's boyfriend. Too ashamed to tell any of the adults in her life, she confided in her brother. When she later heard the news that an uncle had killed her attacker, she felt that her words had killed the man. She fell silent and did not speak for five years.

Maya began to speak again at 13, when she and her brother rejoined their mother in San Francisco. Maya attended Mission High School and won a scholarship to study dance and drama at San Francisco's Labor School, where she was exposed to the progressive ideals that animated her later political activism.

She dropped out of school in her teens to become San Francisco's first African American female cable car conductor. She later returned to high school, but became pregnant in her senior year and graduated a few weeks before giving birth to her son, Guy. She left home at 16 and took on the difficult life of a single mother, supporting herself and her son by working as a waitress and cook, but she had not given up on her talents for music, dance, performance and poetry.

THE MIDDLE YEARS:

FROM NIGHTCLUB SINGER

TO ACTING & WRITING FOR THE MOVEMENT

In 1952, Maya married a Greek sailor named Tosh Angelos. When she began h er career as a nightclub singer, she took the professional name Maya Angelou, combining her childhood nickname with a form of her husband's name. Although the marriage did not last, her performing career flourished. She toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess in 1954 and 1955. She studied modern dance with Martha Graham, danced with Alvin Ailey on television variety shows and recorded her first record album, Calypso Lady (1957).

She had composed song lyrics and poems for many years, and by the end of the 1950s was increasingly interested in developing her skills as a writer. She moved to New York, where she joined the Harlem Writers Guild and took her place among the growing number of young black writers and artists associated with the Civil Rights Movement.

THE AFRICAN EXPERIENCE

In New York, she fell in love with the South African civil rights activist Vusumzi Make and in 1960, the couple moved, with Angelou's son, to Cairo, Egypt. In Cairo, Angelou served as editor of the English language weekly The Arab Observer. Angelou and Guy later moved to Ghana, where she joined a thriving group of African American expatriates. She served as an instructor and assistant administrator at the University of Ghana's School of Music and Drama, worked as feature editor for The African Review and wrote for The Ghanaian Times and the Ghanaian Broadcasting Company.

During her years abroad, she read and studied voraciously, mastering French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and the West African language Fanti. She met with the American dissident leader Malcolm X in his visits to Ghana, and corresponded with him as his thinking evolved from the racially polarized thinking of his youth to the more inclusive vision of his maturity.

THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST YEARS

... THEN DEVASTED BY DR. KING'S ASSASSINATION

Maya Angelou returned to America in 1964, with the intention of helping Malcolm X build his new Organization of African American Unity. Shortly after her arrival in the United States, Malcolm X was assassinated, and his plans for a new organization died with him.

Angelou involved herself in television production and remained active in the Civil Rights Movement, working more closely with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who requested that Angelou serve as Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. His assassination, falling on her birthday in 1968, left her devastated.

THE PRODUCTIVE YEARS:

THE CAGED BIRD BEGINS TO SING

With the guidance of her friend, novelist James Baldwin (shown here on the left with Maya), she found solace in writing, and began work on the book that would become I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Published in 1970 to widespread critical acclaim and enormous popular success, the book tells the story of her life from her childhood in Arkansas to the birth of her child.

Seemingly overnight, Angelou became a national figure. In the following years, books of her verse and the subsequent volumes of her autobiographical narrative won her a huge international audience.

The list of her published works now includes more than 30 titles, including numerous volumes of verse. Her poetry draws heavily on her personal history, using almost entirely short lyrics, expressed in strong, often jazzy rhythms. Themes common to the life experiences of many American blacks - discrimination, exploitation, being on welfare - and many other social issues and problems are explored from a black perspective.

One of her best known poems is Phenomenal Woman in which Maya Angelou uses repetition – "I'm a woman / Phenomenally. / Phenomenal woman, / That's me" - to stress over and over the qualities that make a woman special. In the final stanza she tells the reader that now they should understand and be proud of her as once again she lists her personal qualities: "It's in the click of my heels, The bend of my hair, the palm of my hand, the need for my care. 'Cause I'm a woman phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That's me."

In the poem, And Still I Rise, Maya Angelou celebrates the power that resides in all of us to overcome the most difficult circumstances, an affirmation of the faith that restores and nourishes the soul. Angelou's words paint a portrait of the amazing human spirit, its quiet dignity, and pools of strength and courage.

IN HER OWN WORDS:

ADVICE ESPECIALLY FOR YOUNG BLACK WOMEN & mEN

In a recent interview conducted by the Academy of Achievement, Maya Angelou gave the following advice to all young men and women, and especially African American men and women.

On Reading: “Read ceaselessly. Read. All knowledge, my dear young man and woman – all knowledge! – is spendable currency. Read. Put it in the old bean. You'll be amazed how it will serve you.”

On Speaking: “And, I would encourage you all to talk so that your speech is more clear. Listen, this is a very good tip: Go into your room, close the door and read something aloud, just for yourself, just so that you can hear how the voice can carry. Lift yourselves up, physically, so that you get lots of air down into your lungs, and speak, speak out. So go into your rooms, young men and women, black and white, go in, close the door and read aloud. Read from Thomas Paine, if you will. Read from Martin Luther King. Just read, read Barbara Jordan's speeches aloud.”

And, On Being Cynical: “One of the saddest things in the world is to see a cynical young person. Because it means that he or she has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. It is so sad. We need you so desperately. We adults should be telling you every morning while you're having breakfast, while you're on the bus - we should be telling you, ‘You are all we have. Everything we've done, negative and positive, has been for you. You are all there is for us. Darling, you're the best we've got, and we need you.’"

[To read the entire Academy Of Achievement interview with Maya Angelou, click this link. ]