Maya Angelou

At 86 years old, Maya Angelou has this physical status:

Maya Angelou (listen) was born Marguerite Johnson; born in 1928 (April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was an American poet, singer, memoirist, and civil rights activist.

She has written seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is listed with a collection of plays, movies, and television shows dating back to over 50 years.

She has received hundreds of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees.

Angelou is best known for her seven autobiographies, which emphasize her childhood and early adult experiences.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), the first book about the woman who lived up to the age of 17 and earned her international recognition and acclaim. After a string of jobs as an adult, including fry cook, sex employee, nightclub dancer, and actress, Porgy and Bess' co-founder, and a writer in Egypt and Ghana during Africa's decolonization, she became a poet and writer.

She was an actress, writer, producer, and producer of plays, films, and public television shows.

She was named the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1982.

She was instrumental in the Civil Rights Movement and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. She made about 80 appearances a year on the lecture circuit, an extension of her eighties, beginning in the 1990s.

Angelou read her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" (1993), the first female recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. Angelou spoke out about certain aspects of her personal life after the release of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Her reputation as a black woman and a woman has risen, and her books have been viewed as a symbol of black culture.

Her books are widely used in colleges and universities around the world, but attempts to outlaw her books from some American libraries have been unsuccessful.

Some commentators regard Angelou's most celebrated works as autobiographical fiction, but many commentators regard them as autobiographies.

She made a deliberate attempt to destabilize the autobiography's common framework by criticizing, altering, and expanding the subject.

Her books are focused on topics such as racial identity, family, and travel.

Early life

On April 4, 1928, Marguerite Johnson, the second child of Bailey Johnson, a doorman and navy dietitian, and Vivian (Baxter) Johnson, a nurse and card dealer, was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Bailey Jr., Angelou's older brother, was named "Maya" in honor of "My" or "My Sister." Angelou was three years old and her brother four, and their parents' "calamitous marriage" ended, and their father took them to Stamps, Arkansas, alone by train, to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson. Angelou's grandmother, "an extraordinary exception" to the stifling economics of African Americans of the time, prospered financially during the Great Depression and World War II because the general store she owned sold essential commodities and because "he made intelligent and honest investments."

The children's fathers returned them to Stamps without warning four years later, when Angelou was seven and eight years old, and their mother's care in St. Louis was complete. Angelou, a man named Freeman, was sexually assaulted and insulted by her mother's boyfriend when she was living with her mother. She told her brother, who told the rest of their family, that she knew them by heart. Although the man was found guilty, he was only jailed for a day. He was killed four days after his release, most likely by Angelou's uncles. Angelou went mute for almost five years, with her comment that "I thought, my voice killed him; I killed the guy because I told him." "I thought I'd never speak again because my voice would kill anyone." According to Marcia Ann Gillespie, who wrote a biography of Angelou, it was during this period of silence that Angelou developed her extraordinary memory, her passion for reading and seeing the world around her.

Angelou and her brother were sent back to their grandmother just a few months after the Freeman's murder, when Angelou was eight years old and her brother nine. She attended the Lafayette County Training School, a Rosenwald School, in Stamps. "You do not love poetry, not until you talk it," Angelou says of a former teacher and friend of her family, Mrs. Bertha Flowers, who helped her talk again. Flowers introduced her to writers such as Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson, as well as Black female artists such as Frances Harper, Anne Spencer and Jessie Fauset.

When Angelou was fourteen and her brother 15, they and their mother, who had since moved to Oakland, California, were welcomed together again by her mother. Angelou attended the California Labor School during World War II. She became San Francisco's first Black female streetcar conductor at the age of 16. She wanted the job badly, admiring the operators' uniforms, to the extent that her mother referred to it as her "dream job." Her mother encouraged her to apply for the position, but she was warned that she would arrive early and work harder than others. Angelou was given a lifetime achievement award by the Conference of Minority Transportation Officials in 2014 as part of a session titled "Women Move the Country."

Clyde was born three weeks after finishing school at the age of seventeen, and she later changed his name to Guy Johnson.

Personal life

Angelou may have partially descended from the Mende people of West Africa, according to evidence. A DNA test revealed that 45 percent of her African ancestors were from the Congo-Angola area, with 55% from West Africa. Mary Lee, Angelou's maternal great-grandmother who had been banned after the Civil War, became pregnant by her white former owner, John Savin, according to a PBS documentary released in 2008. Savin coerced Lee to sign a false statement accusing another individual of being the father of her child. A jury found Savin not guilty after Savin was charged with persuading Lee to commit perjury, but despite the fact that Savin was the father of Lee's conviction, a jury found him not guilty. Lee was taken to the Clinton County poorhouse in Missouri with her daughter, Marguerite Baxter, who became Angelou's grandmother. Lee was branded "that poor little black girl, physically and mentally bruised," Angelou referred to him.

Angelou's life was chronicled in her seven autobiographies and in numerous interviews, addresses, and papers, which were mostly unambiguous. When Angelou spoke about her personal life, she did so politely but "with no time chart in front of her." She married At least twice before being married but never disclosed the number of times she had been married, "for fear of sounding frivolous," she said; according to her autobiographies and to Gillespie, she married Tosh Angelos in 1951 and 1974 and then married Vusumzi Make in 1961, but never officially married him. As she described in her second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, Angelou held various occupations, including some in the sex trade, serving as a prostitute, and a madam for lesbians.

In a 1995 interview, Angelou said,

According to Gillespie, Angelou had one son, Guy, whose birth she chronicled in her first autobiography; one grandson, two great-grandchildren; and a large number of acquaintances and extended family. Vivian Baxter and her brother Bailey Johnson Jr. died in 2000 after a string of strokes; both were vital figures in her life and her books. The mother of her grandson disappeared with him in 1981, but finding him took four years.

Angelou had been hospitalized in Los Angeles when she was alive and well in St. Louis when she was alive and well, prompting widespread fears of her death, according to Angelou. She did not earn a degree, but according to Gillespie, Angelou preferred to be referred to as "Dr. Angelou" by people outside of her family and close friends. She owned two homes in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, as well as a "lordly brownstone" in Harlem, which was purchased in 2004 and was packed with her "growing library" of books she acquired during her lifetime, artwork acquired over the course of many decades, and well-stocked kitchens. Gary Younge of the Guardian reported that in Angelou's Harlem home, many African wall hangings and paintings, including ones of many jazz trumpeters, a watercolor of Rosa Parks, and a Faith Ringgold piece titled "Maya's Quilt Of Life" were among them.

"Her talent in the kitchen is the stuff of legend," Gillespie says at her main residence in Winston-Salem, "from haute cuisine to down-home comfort food." "One of the most coveted invitations in town" was obtained by the Winston-Salem Journal, "securing an invitation to one of Angelou's Thanksgiving dinners, Christmas tree decorating parties, or birthday parties." The New York Times, describing Angelou's stay in New York City, reported that she hosted elaborate New Year's Day parties. Hallelujah, her 2004 book, combined her cooking and writing skills. The Welcome Table featured 73 recipes, some of which she learned from her grandmother and mother, as well as 28 vignettes. All Day Long: Cook Splendidly, Eat Smart, which concentrated on weight loss and portion control, followed up in 2010 with her second book, Great Food, which concentrated on weight loss and portion control.

Angelou used the same "writing ritual" for many years, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She would awakened early in the morning and check into a hotel room, where employees were instructed to delete any photographs from the walls. While lying on the bed, Roque's Thesaurus, Roque's Thesaurus, and the Bible, she'll write on legal pads and then move to Solitaire, Roque's Thesaurus, and the Bible. She would average 10–12 pages of written material a day, which she cut down to three or four pages in the evening. "Enchant" herself, she went through this process, and "relive the agony, the anguish, the Sturm und Drang," she said in a 1989 interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation. She returned to the time she wrote about, as well as horrific experiences such as her rape in Caged Bird, in order to "tell the human truth" about her life. Angelou said she used her cards to get to the point of enchantment and in order to access her memories more efficiently. "It's likely that it will take an hour to learn about it," she said, but it will be great!"

It's so delicious!"

She did not find the process cathartic, but rather, she found solace in "telling the truth."

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Career

Despite the condemnation of interracial unions at the time and her mother's disapproval of her mother, Angelou married Tosh Angelos, a Greek electrician, former sailor, and aspiring guitarist. She took modern dance lessons at this time, as well as dancers and choreographers Alvin Ailey and Ruth Beckford. Ailey and Angelou formed "Al and Rita" as a dance group and performed contemporary dance at fraternal Black organizations around San Francisco, but the group never became popular. Angelou, her new husband, and her son moved to New York City to study African dance with Trinidadian dancer Pearl Primus, but the pair returned to San Francisco a year later.

After Angelou's marriage ended in 1954, she danced in clubs around San Francisco, including the nightclub The Purple Onion, where she sang and danced to calypso music. Up to this point, she went by the name "Marguerite Johnson," or "Rita," but The Purple Onion's founder and supporter changed her name to "Maya Angelou" (her nickname and former married surname). It was a "distinctive name" that set her apart and captured the essence of her calypso dance performances. Angelou toured Europe between 1954 and 1955 with a performance of the opera Porgy and Bess. She began learning the language of every country she visited, and in a few years, she achieved fluency in many languages. Angelou released Miss Calypso, her first album, in 1957, riding the success of calypso. Angelou appeared in an off-Broadway analysis that inspired the 1957 film Calypso Heat Wave, in which she performed her own compositions and sang.

In 1959, Angelou met novelist John Oliver Killens who then moved to New York to concentrate on her writing career at his request. She joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she met numerous famous African-American writers, including John Henrik Clarke, Rosa Guy, Paule Marshall, and Julian Mayfield, and was published for the first time. She and Killens founded "the epic" Cabaret for Freedom in 1960 after meeting civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and hearing him speak, and she was named SCLC's Northern Coordinator. Lyman B. Hagen, a scholar, said that her contributions to civil rights as a fundraiser and SCLC organizer were fruitful and "eminently effective." During this period, Angelou began her pro-Castro and anti-apartheid activism. When she first arrived in Harlem New York at the Hotel Theresa on September 19, 1960, she joined the crowd clapping for Fidel Castro.

Angelou appeared in Jean Genet's play The Blacks, as well as Abbey Lincoln, Roscoe Brown, James Earl Jones, Godfrey Cambridge, and Cicely Tyson. She first met South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make in 1961; they never officially married; perhaps later in 1961. Make and her son Guy went to Cairo, where Angelou worked as an assistant editor at the weekly English-language newspaper The Arab Observer. She and Guy died in 1962, and she and her husband moved to Accra, Ghana, so he could attend college, but he was seriously injured in a car crash. Angelou stayed in Accra for his recovery and ended up staying there until 1965. She worked at the University of Ghana as an administrator and was active in the African-American expatriate community. She served and appeared in Ghana's National Theatre as a feature editor for The African Review, a freelance writer for the Ghanaian Times, and hosted Radio Ghana. She appeared in a revival of The Blacks in Geneva and Berlin.

On her visit to Accra in the early 1960s, she became close friends with Malcolm X. Angelou returned to the United States in 1965 to help him create the Organization of Afro-American Unity, a new civil rights group; he was assassinated shortly afterward. She returned to Hawaii, where she revived her singing career after being devastated and adrift. She returned to Los Angeles to concentrate on her writing career. Angelou, a market researcher in Watts, was among the protesters during the summer of 1965. She performed in and wrote plays and returned to New York in 1967. Rosa Guy, her lifelong friend, and reconnected with James Baldwin, whom she had seen in Paris in the 1950s and referred to as "my brother" at that time. Angelou's friend, Jerry Purcell, lent her a stipend to help her write.

Martin Luther King Jr. ordered Angelou to arrange a march in 1968. She agreed but postponed it again, and as a result of Gillespie's "a macabre twist of fate," she was assassinated on her 40th birthday (April 4). She was aided out of her sadness by her companion James Baldwin, who was sadly deceased once more. "If 1968 was a year of great pain, loss, and sadness, it was also the year when America first witnessed Maya Angelou's spirit and creative genius." Despite having almost no expertise, she wrote, produced, and narrated Blacks, Blues, Black, a ten-part series of documentaries about the connection between blues music and Black Americans' African roots, and what Angelou called the "Africanisms still present in the United States" for National Educational Television, the precursor to PBS. She wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a memoir that was inspired by a dinner party she attended with Baldwin, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and his wife Judy, and was confronted by Random House reporter Robert Loomis in 1969. This brought her international recognition and acclaim.

Angelou's Georgia, Georgia, 1972, produced by a Swedish film company and shot in Sweden, was the first black woman to film a filmplay. Despite having no additional involvement in the film's development, she also wrote the film's soundtrack. In San Francisco in 1973, Angelou married Paul du Feu, a Welsh carpenter and ex-husband of writer Germaine Greer. "She [Angelou] did more than ten years in a decade," Gillespie says. Angelou performed as a composer, writing for singer Roberta Flack, and composing movie scores. She wrote essays, short stories, television scripts, film scripts, autobiographies, and poetry. She performed plays and was named visiting professor at several colleges and universities. She was "a reluctant actress" and was nominated for a Tony Award in 1973 for her role in Look Away. In 1988, she undertook a revival of Errol John's play Moon on a Rainbow Shawl at the Almeida Theatre in London.

Angelou appeared in a supporting role in the television mini-series Roots in 1977. During this period, she received a number of honorary degrees from colleges and universities around the world. Angelou was a television presenter in Baltimore, Maryland, when Winfrey was a television anchor in Baltimore, Maryland; later, she would be Winfrey's close friend and mentor. Angelou and du Feu divorced in 1981.

She returned to the southern United States in 1981 because she felt she had to face her experience there, and she was a lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she was one of the few full-time African-American professors. She began by saying that she was "a teacher who writes" from that point. Angelou wrote on a variety of topics that related to her academic interests, including philosophy, ethics, philosophy, math, science, theater, and writing. "She never really lived down all of the critique she received from people who believed she was more of a celebrity than an intellect," the Winston-Salem Journal revealed. In 2011, she taught at Wake Forest, but she plans to teach another course in late 2014. It was in late 2013 that she would have her last speaking engagement at the university. Angelou began participating in the lecture circuit in a customised tour bus in the 1990s, something she continued into her eighties.

Angelou read her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993, becoming the first poet to perform an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's 1961 inauguration. Her recitation resulted in more fame and success for her previous works, as well as a broader appeal "across racial, economic, and educational boundaries." The poem's recording was nominated for a Grammy Award. She wrote "A Brave and Startling Truth" in June 1995, Richard Long's second 'public' poem, which commemorated the United Nations' 50th anniversary of independence.

In 1996, Angelou met her goal of directing a film in the Delta, which starred actors such as Alfre Woodard and Wesley Snipes. She appeared on seven of their album Been Found's eleven tracks in 1996. The album was responsible for three of Angelou's only Billboard chart appearances. She created a successful line of Hallmark products in 2000, including greeting cards and decorative household items. "The company was perfectly in keeping with her reputation as the people's poet," she responded to critics who accused her of being too commercial by saying that the company was perfectly in keeping with her role as 'the people's poet.' Angelou's sixth autobiography, A Song Flung Up to Heaven, was published in 2002, more than 30 years since she began writing her life story.

In the 2008 presidential primaries, Angelou ran for the Democratic Party, extending her public assistance to Hillary Clinton. The Clinton campaign ran ads in South Carolina touting Angelou's endorsement. The ads were part of the campaign's attempts to rally support in the Black community; but, Barack Obama took the South Carolina primary, finishing 29 points ahead of Clinton and receiving 8 percent of the Black vote. Angelou rallied behind Obama after Clinton's campaign ended, winning the presidential election and becoming the first African-American president of the United States. "We are expanding beyond the idiocies of bigotry and misogyny," Obama said at his inauguration.

Angelou donated her personal papers and work memorabilia to the Schomburg Center for Black Culture in Harlem in late 2010. They consisted of more than 340 boxes of papers that included her handwritten notes on yellow legal pads for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Coretta Scott King's 1982 telegram, fan mail, and personal and professional correspondence from colleagues, including her editor Robert Loomis. Angelou, a psychologist, worked on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., protesting a king's quote that appeared on the memorial, saying, "The quote makes Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit" and demanding that it be changed. The operative was eventually decommissioned.

Angelou's seventh volume of autobiography, entitled Mom & Me & Mom, which focuses on her mother's relationship, was published in 2013.

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