Marguerite Annie Johnson was born in St Louis in 1928, sent at three with her older brother to live with their grandmother in segregated Stamps, Arkansas, raped at seven by her mother's boyfriend in St Louis, and silent for nearly five years afterwards. In her twenties and thirties she was a streetcar conductor, a cook, a sex worker, a calypso singer, a journalist for African-American papers in Cairo and Accra, a co-ordinator for Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a friend of Malcolm X. James Baldwin and the cartoonist Jules Feiffer talked her into writing memoir. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), about her childhood and the rape, became the first nonfiction bestseller by a Black American woman; six more volumes of autobiography followed across thirty-three years. She wrote screenplays, plays, cookbooks, children's books, and ten volumes of poetry; she became a Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in 1981; on 20 January 1993 she stood at Bill Clinton's inauguration and read 'On the Pulse of Morning,' the first poet to read at a presidential inauguration since Robert Frost did so for Kennedy in 1961. She received over fifty honorary doctorates. She died in Winston-Salem in May 2014 at eighty-six. Her books had been translated into more than two dozen languages.
All Figures
Poet · Memoirist · Civil Rights Activist
Maya Angelou
1,928 CE – 2,014 CE
The Black American poet and memoirist whose seven-volume autobiography, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, gave a generation a language for surviving trauma — and who recited 'On the Pulse of Morning' at Bill Clinton's first inauguration.
Lifetime
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