Today (28/05/2024) marks 10 years since the death of the memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist, Maya Angelou. Born Marguerite Annie Johnson on 4 April 1928, she became known as “Maya”, due to the way her older brother, Bailey, called her "My-a sister". Best known for her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Angelou boasted a prolific literary career in which she published six further autobiographies, three volumes of essays, and several anthologies of poetry. She was also an actress, writer, director, and producer.
Angelou experienced hardship and abuse in her formative years. At the age of three her parents’ marriage ended, after which she was sent with her brother to live in Arkansas with their paternal grandmother. Briefly returning to her mother’s care in St. Louis at the age of seven Maya was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. She told her brother, who alerted the rest of the family. The man was found guilty after Maya testified against him. Yet he only served one day in jail. He was murdered after his release, supposedly by Maya’s uncles. Following this, Maya was rendered mute for five years. “When I heard about his murder,” as she later explained, “I thought my voice had killed a man and so it wasn't safe to speak.”[1] It was during this time that Angelou developed her love of literature. Having been sent back to their grandmother, the siblings attended the Lafayette County Training School. Mrs Flowers, a teacher and friend of her grandmother, helped Maya to speak again. She challenged her by saying, "You do not love poetry. You will never love it until you speak it."[2]
Once again returning to be with her mother, who had since relocated to California, at the age of 16 Angelou became the first Black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco. Her mother encouraged her to pursue the position, warning her that she would have to work harder than others to achieve it. Not long after this, Maya gave birth to her only child, a son named Guy Johnson, who was conceived during a one-night stand. To support her son as a single mother, she became a fry cook and performed in nightclubs.
In 1951, she married Tosh Angelos despite the widespread disapproval of interracial relationships that existed at the time. She also began taking dance classes where she met the choreographer, Alvin Ailey. The pair formed a dance duo, calling themselves "Al and Rita", which never became a success. This did, however, spark the beginnings of Angelou’s professional career in the arts. Her marriage ended in 1954, after which she toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess. She released her first album, Miss Calypso, in 1957. She went on to meet the novelist John Killens in 1959. He encouraged her to focus on her writing career. She subsequently moved to New York and joined the Harlem Writers Guild.
It was in New York that much of her activism work began. Here, she met the civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr., and became the coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King would later ask her to organise a civil rights march, which she agreed to. Yet he was assassinated on Angelou’s 40th birthday (4 April 1968), before the envisioned march could take place. Angelou refused to celebrate her birthday for several years after his death.
In 1961, Angelou and her son followed Vusumzi Make, a South African freedom fighter, to Cairo. Angelou remained ambiguous about how many times she married in her lifetime "for fear of sounding frivolous”, but it is understood that she and Make never did. [3] She worked as an associate editor for The Arab Observer, before her relationship with Make ended and she moved on to Ghana in the interests of her son’s education. Whilst in Accra, Angelou became close with Malcom X and helped him build a new civil rights organisation. Devastated by his assassination shortly afterwards, she moved back to Los Angeles to focus on her writing. At a dinner party, she was challenged by Random House Editor, Robert Loomis, to write an autobiography. Angelou never saw herself as a memoirist, but was not one to turn down a challenge:
“You may be right not to attempt autobiography, because it is nearly impossible to write autobiography as literature,” he said.
“Almost impossible.” Ms. Angelou replied, “I’ll start tomorrow.”[4]
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings brought her international acclaim. The memoir charts her transformation from a victim of racism who was made to feel inferior, to a self-assured young lady, able to harness the power of her words to respond to prejudice.[5] Almost written in the form of a bildungsroman (a literary genre that focuses on the psychological growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood), her story begins at the age of three and concludes with her becoming a mother at 17. The work was one of the first autobiographies by a Black woman to reach a mainstream audience. According to the writer and critic Hilton Als, it also marked one of the first times a Black autobiographer was able to "write about blackness from the inside, without apology or defense".[6]
Many attempts have been made to ban the text and remove it from school curriculums in the US due to its sexually explicit themes, its depictions of rape and violence, and Angelou’s promotion of non-traditional values.
She began to publish her poetry after the success of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, most notably the poems Still I Rise (1978), Caged Bird (1983), and On the Pulse of Morning (1993). She was asked to perform the latter at the presidential inauguration of Bill Clinton, becoming the second poet, after Robert Frost, to deliver a recitation at this state ceremony. Yasmin DeGout, an associate professor in African American and Caribbean Literatures, has contended that the reading “brought her [Angelou’s] poetic voice and practice into the national arena and into the national consciousness”.[7]
During her second marriage to a Welshman named Paul de Feu, Angelou became close friends with, and mentor to, Oprah Winfrey. Despite not holding a bachelor’s degree, Angelou went on to accept a lifetime professorship of American studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Indeed, she received more than thirty honorary degrees from colleges and universities around the world. She was even awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award of the US, from president Barack Obama in 2010.
Angelou’s contributions to the arts, activism, academia, and politics are celebrated for their significant impact upon society and culture. As Joanne Gabbin, a professor of English, has put it
“Angelou's sensitive understanding of love, disappointment, despair, anger, and joy has equipped her with wisdom and insight and has endeared her to countless [individuals] who cross racial, class, and gender lines”.[8]
Angelou’s work has been considered a defense of Black culture, as she strove to bring the marginalised into the mainstream. Her story of overcoming racial and sexual abuse, and her dedication to civil rights activism, has left a profound and lasting mark upon the world.
[1] “Obituary: Maya Angelou,” BBC News, 28 May 2014, available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-23514894.
[2] "'Fresh Air' Remembers Poet and Memoirist Maya Angelou," interview by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, NPR, 28 May 2014, available at https://www.npr.org/2014/05/28/316707321/fresh-air-remembers-poet-and-memoirist-maya-angelou.
[3] Gary Younge, “No Surrender,” The Guardian, 25 May 2002, available at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/may/25/biography.mayaangelou.
[4] Pierre A. Walker, “Racial Protest, Identity, Words, and Form in Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” College Literature 22, no. 3 (1995): 91-108, 91.
[5] Walker, “Racial Protest, Identity, Words, and Form in Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” 104.
[6] Hilton Als, “Songbird,” The New Yorker, 28 July 2002, available at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/08/05/songbird.
[7] Yasmin Y. DeGout, “The Poetry of Maya Angelou: Liberation Ideology and Technique,” The Langston Hughes Review 19 (2005): 36-47, 36.
[8] Joanne V. Gabbin, “Maya Angelou—The Peoples' Poet Laureate An Introduction,” The Langston Hughes Review 19 (2005): 3-7, 4.