Maya Angelou

American · 1928 to 2014

Born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, the younger of two children of Bailey Johnson, a doorman and navy dietitian, and Vivian Baxter, a card dealer, Maya Angelou owed the name Maya to her older brother Bailey, who called her My Sister. After her parents' marriage collapsed, the children were put alone on a train to Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their paternal grandmother Annie Henderson, who ran the general store and prospered improbably through the Depression. At eight she was raped by her mother's boyfriend in St. Louis; he was murdered four days after his brief sentence, probably by her uncles, and the child, believing her voice had killed him, went mute for almost five years. A teacher in Stamps, Bertha Flowers, brought her back to speech through Dickens, Shakespeare, and the recitation of Black women poets. At sixteen she became the first Black streetcar conductor in San Francisco. She danced calypso, sang in nightclubs, joined the Harlem Writers Guild, lived in Cairo and Accra, and worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) was the first of seven autobiographies, telling her life up to seventeen. In 1993, at Bill Clinton's first inauguration, she read On the Pulse of Morning, the first poet to deliver an inaugural poem since Robert Frost. She held the Reynolds Professorship at Wake Forest from 1982 to her death, gave roughly eighty lectures a year into her eighties, and collected over fifty honorary degrees. She died on the morning of May 28, 2014, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, at eighty-six.