Black History Month - YOUMANITY celebrates Maya Angelou
For Black History Month 2014, YOUMANITY celebrates the life of Maya Angelou, Civil Rights Activist.
Born Marguerite Johnson in St Louis, Missouri, on 4 April 1928, she was the daughter of nurse Vivian Baxter Johnson, and Navy cook, Bailey Johnson. When her parents divorced, Vivien could not cope with her two small children, sending them to live with their grandmother.
Maya Angelou spent much of the next ten years growing up in one of America’s poorest regions, experiencing the harsh effects of racial segregation. Maya described this experience most vividly in her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970). Aged seven, Maya was raped by her mother’s boyfriend who was later jailed. Upon his release he was murdered - allegedly by an uncle of Maya’s. For the next five years the young girl became mute.
“I was a volunteer mute. I had voice but I refused to use it,” she later recalled. “When I heard about his murder, I thought my voice had killed a man and so it wasn’t safe to speak. “After a while, I no longer knew why I didn’t speak, I simply didn’t speak.”
It is during these silent years that Maya developed her love for poetry. Still, to earn a living she moved to San Francisco with her mother. Aged 16, she gave birth to a boy “after a loveless one-night stand”.
She embarked on an extraordinary career that included stints as a dancer, waitress, prostitute and pimp. She became an actress and singer, recorded an album of Calypso songs, appeared on Broadway and travelled to Europe in a touring production of Porgy and Bess.
Maya Angelou took ther surname from her first husband, Greek musician Enistasios Angelos.
In the early sixties Maya worked for Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, then followed a South African freedom fighter, Vusumzi Make, to Cairo. Later she took her son to Ghana, where she met the Black activist Malcolm X. Maya returned to the United States in 1965 to work for Malcolm X who was killed a few years before Martin Luther King assassination.
“I along with a number of young people at the time had been disenchanted, and felt angry and protested inequality,” she told the BBC.
It was writer James Baldwin who persuaded Maya to write her autobiography. Six more volumes followed. They were a huge success.
She went on to publish poetry as well writing a ten-part TV series about the Blues and Black Americans’ African heritage.
Maya had become the world’s best-known Black female writer and one of America’s best-known Black women.
Bill Clinton acknowledged her status by asking her to read a poem at his inauguration in 1993.
In 2010, Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
