Maya Angelou was born Marguerite
Anne Johnson on April 4, 1928,
in St. Louis, Missouri. Her older brother, Bailey Johnson, Jr.,
could not pronounce her name when he was little, so he called her
Mya Sister, then My, which eventually became Maya. When Angelou
was three years old, her parents divorced and sent their children
to live in the rural, segregated town of Stamps, Arkansas, with
their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson. During their teens,
they lived with their mother, Vivian Baxter, in California. At the
age of fifteen, Angelou began her career as a civil-rights activist
of sorts. She battled racism with dogged persistence and succeeded
in becoming the first African American hired to the position of
streetcar conductor in San Francisco.
Angelou has remained a civil-rights activist throughout
her life. At Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s request, Angelou became
the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in
the 1960s. Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy
Carter also respected her leadership qualities. Ford appointed her
to the American Revolutionary Bicentennial Advisory Commission,
and Carter appointed her to the National Commission on the Observance
of the International Woman’s Year. At President Bill Clinton’s request, she
wrote and delivered a poem, “On the Pulse of Morning,” for his 1993 presidential
inauguration, becoming only the second poet in American history
to receive such an honor.
Maya Angelou’s work in the arts includes writing, film,
and theater. She moved to New York and earned a role in the Gershwin opera Porgy
and Bess. Along with the rest of the cast, she toured nearly
two-dozen countries in Europe and Africa from 1954 to 1955.
After marrying a South African freedom fighter, Angelou lived in
Cairo, Egypt, for several years, where she edited an English-language
newspaper. Later, she taught at the University of Ghana and edited
the African Review.
Angelou often shared stories about her unusual, intense,
and poignant childhood, and her friends and associates encouraged
her to write an autobiography. In 1969, Angelou
published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the
first in a series of autobiographical works. It quickly became a
best-seller and was nominated for the National Book Award. Angelou’s Georgia,
Georgia became the first original screenplay by a black
woman to be produced and filmed. Just Give Me a Cool Drink
of Water ’fore I Die, a collection of poetry, was nominated
for the Pulitzer Prize. Angelou was also nominated for an Emmy award
for her performance in the film adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots. By 1995,
she had spent two years on The New York Times Paperback
Nonfiction Bestseller list, becoming the first African American
author to achieve such success.
Out of her five autobiographies, I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings is probably Angelou’s most popular and
critically acclaimed volume. The book is now frequently read as
a complement to fictional works that delve into the subject of racism,
such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. It has often been
cut from reading lists because it involves honest depictions of
Angelou’s sexuality and her experience of being raped as a child.
She wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings at a
time when autobiographies of women, and particularly black women, had
begun to proclaim women’s significance in the mainstream as thinkers
and activists. Angelou’s book conveys the difficulties associated
with the mixture of racial and gender discrimination endured by
a southern black girl. At the same time, she speaks to many other issues,
such as the relationships between parents and children, child abuse,
and the search for one’s own path in life.
