Author, poet, singer, dancer, actor, screenwriter, director, and civil rights activist Maya Angelou was born April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Mo. Her parents separated when she was still quite young, resulting in Angelou and her brother moving to Arkansas to live with their grandmother. Angelou suffered a great deal of racial prejudice while living there. Around the age of 7, while staying with her mother, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. After she told her brother what had happened, the boyfriend was arrested. After being jailed for only a few days, the man was released and then murdered, most likely by Angelou’s uncles. The event was so traumatic that Angelou stopped speaking almost entirely for years afterword.
During World War II, Angelou moved to San Francisco and began studying dancing and acting at the California Labor School. Sometime in the mid-1950s, her acting and singing career really began to pick up steam. She was cast in a touring production of Porgy and Bess, and later was in an off-Broadway revue, Calypso Heatwave, that inspired the film Calypso Heat Wave. At this time, she also released her first album, Miss Calypso. She continued her acting career for decades to follow, and eventually won a Tony award for her role in the play Look Away (1973), as well as an Emmy award for her appearance on the television program Roots (1977). In the 1970s, she expanded her career to include screenwriter when she wrote the screenplay for the film Georgia, Georgia. This made her the first African American woman to have her screenplay produced. In 1998, she added film director to her credits when she directed Down in the Delta.
Maya Angelou was a prolific writer and a member of the Harlem Writer’s Guild. She was known best for her 1969 memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. This novel became the very first best-selling nonfiction work by an African American woman. She was also a well-known poet, and she recited one of her poems at President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration in 1993. She wrote several novels and poetry collections in her lifetime, including Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie, for which she was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her works also included collections of essays and seven autobiographies.
Angelou worked diligently as a civil rights activist and served as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) northern coordinator. While in that role, she organized and starred in a musical revue titled Cabaret for Freedom, a benefit event for the SCLC. She was good friends with Martin Luther King, Jr., who was killed on her fortieth birthday. She spent a good portion of the 1960s living in Africa, first in Egypt and later in Ghana. While living in Africa, she became friends with civil rights leader Malcolm X and later assisted him with establishing the Organization for Afro-American Unity.
Maya gave birth to a son, Guy, in 1944. She was very secretive about her marriages, but it’s assumed that she was married at least three times, including to Anastasios Angelopulos, a Greek sailor, and Paul de Feu, a carpenter.
Angelou passed away on May 28, 2014, at her home in North Carolina. She was honored by many politicians and celebrities, including President Barack Obama. In her lifetime, she received countless awards, honors, and accolades. Her incredible career served to forge a path for many artists to follow.
