Maya Angelou overcame more than her fair share of hardship to become one the most influential
and popular authors in American history.
This is the tragic - and ultimately triumphant - real-life story of Maya Angelou.
Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928.
For the first years of her life, she was raised in California, but at the age of three her
parents separated and essentially mailed her to her grandmother in Arkansas.
She told NPR,
"They put me and my brother on a train, without any companionship, without any adult, put
tags on our arms, and said, 'This child should be delivered to Miss Annie Henderson in Stamps,
Arkansas.'"
Angelou credits her grandmother for raising her.
But when she was just seven years old, things took a tragic turn.
During a trip to St. Louis to visit her mother, Angelou was sexually assaulted by her mother's
boyfriend.
She told her brother, who told the family, who had the man arrested.
When he got off with just a single day in jail, though, someone took the law into their
own hands and murdered him in retaliation.
Angelou withdrew into herself.
Convinced that saying the man's name had led to his death, she believed her voice to be,
quote, "a killing machine."
"And I thought, my voice killed that man."
She became mute, not speaking a word for five years.
Instead, she turned to reading and literature, memorizing all the poetry she could find.
She later told Smithsonian,
"I believe that my brain reconstructed itself during those years.
I believe that the areas in the brain which provide and promote physical speech had nothing
to do...And so, I've been able to develop a memory quite unusual, which has allowed
me to learn languages, really quite a few."
When Angelou and her brother became teenagers, her grandmother decided it was too dangerous
for them to remain in the south, so she sent them to live with their mother in Oakland,
California.
Angelou studied acting and dance, but at age 16 she became pregnant.
Determined to finish her education, she hid it from her mother until after her high school
graduation.
After giving birth to her only son, Guy Johnson, Angelou moved out of the house and struck
out on her own, working odd jobs to support herself and her son.
She soon also began a relationship with an older, married man, who was deep in debt from
gambling.
Promising to marry her once he had the money, he convinced Angelou to work in a brothel
in order to pay off his debt.
Though the experience wasn't one Angleou was proud of, she also wasn't ashamed to speak
or write about it, recounting the whole experience in her 1974 memoir Gather Together in my Name.
She told NPR,
"Children need to know you can stumble and fumble and fall, see where you are and get
up, forgive yourself, and go on about the business of living your life."
In the 1950s, Angelou turned her attention to her dance career and began performing in
clubs around San Francisco.
She also took modern dance classes, where she met famed dancer Alvin Ailey.
The pair teamed up for a short time, dancing together as "Al and Rita," but their act never
took off.
Angelou and her husband Tosh Angelos moved to New York City, where she studied African
dance for one year under the famed choreographer Pearl Primus, before returning to San Francisco.
After divorcing Angelos, she began performing cabaret and dancing calypso at the Purple
Onion.
It was there that she officially took on the stage name "Maya Angelou," combining her childhood
nickname with the last name of her former husband.
The newly christened Maya Angelou's stage career started to take off.
From 1954 to 1955, she toured throughout Europe and Africa with a production of Porgy and
Bess.
After returning to America, she performed in the off-Broadway show Calypso Heat Wave,
which was turned into a film.
"Miss Calypso herself, Maya Angelou!"
Angelou also began recording her calypso music performances, releasing her first album of
music, titled "Miss Calypso," in 1957.
While Angelou was performing in clubs around California, she met many influential artists
and writers, including Langston Hughes and novelist and activist John Oliver Killens.
In 1959, Killens suggested she should move to New York permanently and, quote, "come
find out if you really are a writer."
Angelou, who later described herself as, quote, "young enough and silly enough" to take him
up on his offer, moved to New York City, joined the Harlem Writers Guild, and began publishing
her first pieces of writing.
A year later, Angelou met Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and began immersing herself in the
fight for racial equality.
Using her remarkable writing talents to raise funds for the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, Angelou, with actors Godfrey MacArthur Cambridge and Hugh Hurd, wrote and co-produced
Cabaret for Freedom.
The show raised so much money that Angelou was appointed the new director of SCLC's New
York office, where she worked closely with King to organize and raise funds.
Throwing herself into the global civil rights movement, Angelou began a relationship with
a South African freedom fighter.
Along with Angelou's son, the couple moved to Cairo, Egypt, to continue the fight against
apartheid.
While living in Egypt, Angelou wrote for a weekly radical newspaper called The Arab Observer.
After the relationship ended in 1962, Angelou decided to move to Ghana, where her son planned
to attend college.
However, just three days after their arrival in the country, he broke his neck in a car
accident.
Luckily, he made a remarkable recovery and was eventually able to go on to attend college,
while Angelou began working for the magazine The African Review as a features editor.
Angelou continued fighting for civil rights even while living abroad, immersing herself
in the African-American expatriate community there; during King's historic March on Washington
for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, she still participated, marching outside the American Embassy in Accra
in solidarity.
She also became close with activists and writers like W.E.B.
DuBois and Julian Mayfield.
And somehow, Angelou also found time to teach at the University of Ghana's School of Music
and Drama and do freelance work for the Ghanaian Times and Radio Ghana.
It was also during her time in Ghana that she became close with another expatriate living
there: civil rights leader Malcolm X.
In 1965, Angelou returned to America to help Malcolm X create his new Organization of African
American Unity.
Shortly after returning to the United States, Angelou was devastated when Malcolm X was
assassinated.
She briefly moved to Hawaii, then to Los Angeles, where she witnessed the Watts Riots.
Finally, she returned to New York, where she poured her restlessness into her writing.
In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. approached Angelou and asked her to organize a new march.
She agreed, but before the march could happen, King was assassinated - on Angelou's 40th
birthday.
For many years after, she refused to celebrate her birthday, instead visiting King's widow
Coretta Scott King on the anniversary.
That year she also wrote, produced, and narrated the groundbreaking ten part documentary series
Blacks, Blues, Black! about the connection between blues music and Africa.
Inspired by her work and her incredible life, writer James Baldwin and editor Robert Loomis
began encouraging - and then challenging - her to write an autobiography.
Although she was reluctant at first, she eventually decided to try her hand at memoir-writing,
and the result was her acclaimed 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
While Maya Angelou might be best known as a poet and influential memoirist, she also
had a groundbreaking career in film and TV.
Following the success of her series Blacks, Blues, Black!, she wrote the screenplay and
soundtrack for the big screen drama Georgia, Georgia in 1972.
According to Poetry Foundation, this made her the first African-American woman to have
a screenplay produced.
It also gave her the opportunity to become one of the first African-American women to
join the Directors Guild of America - though she wouldn't make her official directorial
debut until she filmed Down in the Delta in 1998 at the age of 70.
Besides writing, producing, and directing, Angelou also returned to acting.
In 1977, she had a supporting role in the groundbreaking mini-series Roots, and two
years later, she adapted her famous autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings into a television
movie.
She continued to act in films like Poetic Justice and How to Make an American Quilt
well into her seventies, making her final film appearance in Tyler Perry's 2006 comedy
film Madea's Family Reunion.
In 1981, tragedy struck Maya Angelou's family.
Angelou's son Guy Johnson had one child of his own, a son named Colin.
On April 13, 1981, Johnson's ex-wife Sharon Murphy picked Colin up for her monthly visitation.
But she never brought the boy back home.
For the next four years, Johnson and Angelou had no contact with Colin, and there were
no leads to his whereabouts - or even if he was still alive.
The stress took a toll on Johnson's health, aggravating his old neck injury so badly that
he was briefly paralyzed from the neck down.
Calcium deposits and blood clots had weakened his spine so badly that he was unable to walk,
and he had to undergo multiple surgeries.
Johnson, however, was determined to make a full recovery and see his son again, telling
The Los Angeles Times,
"When I have my son back, I want him to see me fine."
Angelou and Johnson never stopped searching, spending thousands of dollars investigating
the disappearance.
On May 29, 1985, they caught a break when an acquaintance of Murphy's contacted Angelou,
giving her Murphy’s and Colin's location in Austin, Texas.
Angelou contacted the authorities, and Murphy eventually agreed to meet.
The arranged meeting took place at the home of Angelou's attorney in Austin, and on June
6, 1985, over four years after she'd last laid eyes on him, Angelou was finally able
to bring her grandson home.
In 1973, Maya Angelou returned to the South for the first time since her childhood to
speak at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
She had refused to return to the South for most of her life, writing in Ebony,
"I knew my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with
old hurts."
Eventually, though, she realized that by avoiding her feelings about the South, it was becoming
an ever growing presence in her mind.
She wrote that she needed to, quote, "face the fear/loathing at its source or it would
consume me whole."
In 1981, she was offered the Reynolds Professorship of American Studies at Wake Forest, and she
accepted.
When she first arrived, she was one of only a few African-American professors on staff.
But she wanted to change minds - including her own.
Having found yet another fulfilling calling, Angelou was an active part of the Wake Forest
academic community, teaching courses on a variety of subjects, including "World Poetry
in Dramatic Performance," "African Culture and Impact on U.S.," and "Shakespeare and
the Human Condition."
In 2008, Angelou declared:
"I'm not a writer who teaches.
I'm a teacher who writes.
But I had to work at Wake Forest to know that."
Maya Angelou once remarked in an interview:
"I see myself as a very interested person.
I've never been bored in my life."
With all she accomplished in her lifetime, including famously speaking at President Bill
Clinton's inauguration, it's impossible to see how she could have found time to be bored.
Regardless of the troubles she'd faced in her life, Angelou remained impressively productive,
writing seven autobiographies and publishing the final volume in 2013, at the age of 85.
In addition to teaching and writing, Angelou remained politically and socially active,
campaigning for Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary and Barack Obama in the
general election.
In 2010, Angelou donated her personal papers and memorabilia to the New York Public Library's
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, saying,
"I have always wanted my papers to be at the Schomburg...It's a magnificent depository
of all the information about the African-American experience.
I am grateful that it exists so that all the children, Black and White, Asian, Spanish-speaking,
Native Americans and Aleutian can know there is a place where they can go and find the
truth of the people's history."
Maya Angelou passed away on May 28, 2014, but her legacy continues to inspire others
through her impressive body of work - and a life of triumphing over tragedy.
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