Maya Angelou Son Maya Angelou When She Was a Baby

The Tragic Real-Life Story Of Maya Angelou

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Maya Angelou once said: "I realized when I was about 20 that I would die. [...] Information technology so terrified me that I doublelocked the doors [...] trying to proceed expiry out — and finally I admitted that there was aught I could do well-nigh it. Once I actually came to that decision, I started enjoying life, and I enjoy information technology very much," via Smithsonian Magazine. Angelou's rich enjoyment of all of life'south offerings have led her to earn a Tony Award nomination, iii Grammy Awards, an Emmy, the National Medal of Arts, the Lincoln Medal, and an induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame, amid other honors, co-ordinate to The History Makers.

While her work had long been admired by many for years, her recognition amongst the full general public skyrocketed afterward she became the second poet in history to recite a verse form at a presidential inauguration. In 1993, she read "On the Pulse of Morning" at Pecker Clinton's inauguration, and her fame broadened as even more people began seeking out and affectionate her work. Maya Angelou has become ane the most influential and popular authors in American history, and she overcame more than her fair share of hardships to do so.

Maya Angelou was raised by her grandmother

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Maya Angelou was built-in Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on April iv, 1928, co-ordinate to Britannica. Her mother, Vivian Baxter, a beautiful and sophisticated St. Louis native, fell in love with Bailey Johnson, Angelou's begetter, in 1924, shortly later on he returned from serving in the Navy.

When Angelou was still a baby, her parents moved west, hoping to escape the racism of the Southward and Vivian'due south disapproving family unit. However, in California, their marriage chop-chop turned rocky, and they separated when Angelou was three. She and her v-year-one-time blood brother, Bailey, were sent to alive with her paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, in Stamps, Arkansas, per The Guardian. "They put me and my brother on a train, without any companionship, without whatever adult, put tags on our artillery, and said, 'This kid should be delivered to Miss Annie Henderson in Stamps, Ark,'" Angelou recalled, via NPR. At get-go, she thought that they had done a "terrible thing" to herself and her blood brother, but after in her life, Angelou said she would "thank God [...] I was sent to my paternal grandmother," via Smithsonian Magazine.

Annie Henderson, with her other son, Angelou's Uncle Willie, endemic and operated the local general store. She was a precipitous businesswoman and a loving grandmother. Angelou greatly admired her grandmother, saying, "She gave me so many gifts," including "confidence that I was loved." Stamps, Arkansas, proved to be a relatively safe oasis for the early years of Angelou's life.

"My voice was a killing automobile"

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Angelou returned to St. Louis just once to visit, when she was not quite viii years old. While she was staying with her mother, Vivian's fellow, a man named Freeman, raped Angelou. She told her brothers, who then told the residue of her family. Freeman was arrested and found guilty merely served only one mean solar day in jail for the criminal offence.

Just four days after Freeman was released, nevertheless, Angelou'southward uncles beat him to death in retaliation. After the attack and subsequent killing, Angelou refused to speak for five years. She believed that her vocalization had directly led to the man's expiry, maxim: "My mother and her family tried to woo me away from mutism, but they didn't know what I knew: that my vox was a killing machine," via The Guardian.

Angelou told Smithsonian Magazine that she credited this time for spurring her love for language: "I believe that my encephalon reconstructed itself during those years. I believe that the areas in the encephalon which provide and promote physical voice communication had nothing to do. [...] And and so, I've been able to develop a memory quite unusual, which has allowed me to learn languages, really quite a few." While she did not speak, she immersed herself in the words of literary greats like Shakespeare, Westward.E.B. Du Bois, and Edgar Allan Poe, and memorized all the verse she could observe, including the works of Langston Hughes and Paul Lawrence Dunbar.

Maya Angelou was San Francisco's first African-American female cable auto conductor

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When Angelou was 14 and her brother Bailey was 16, her grandmother decided "he had reached a unsafe age for a black boy in the segregated south," according to The Guardian. She decided it was time to send them both dorsum to alive with their mother, who had since moved to Oakland, California.

In 1942, Angelou began attending the California Labor School in San Francisco, where she studied acting and trip the light fantastic toe on a scholarship, per Biography. To earn extra coin while studying, she decided she wanted to work as a cablevision car conductor, considering she "loved the uniforms," according to Time. The Marketplace Street Railway Company initially refused to hire her because of the colour of her pare, but she was determined. She showed up to the company every morning and sat there reading books until management finally relented and offered her the job. At just xvi years old, she became San Francisco's beginning female African-American cable machine conductor.

Too that year, she became pregnant after having sexual practice to prove she wasn't a lesbian, per Boston.com. Upon telling her mother almost the pregnancy, Angelou later recounted: "She asked me, 'Do you love the boy?' I said no. 'Does he honey you?' I said no. 'Well, there's no point in ruining iii lives. We're going to have us a baby,'" via Smithsonian Magazine. Angelou gave nascency to her just son, Guy Johnson, but one month after her loftier schoolhouse graduation.

Maya Angelou briefly worked in a brothel

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With a new baby to care for, Angelou moved out of her mother's house at just 17 years erstwhile. She establish a room for hire in San Francisco, where the landlady agreed to babysit her son while she worked odd jobs to support them. In her autobiography, Angelou recalled some of the jobs she held in that time, including "a shake dancer in night clubs, fry cook in hamburger joints, dinner cook in a Creole restaurant and once had a job in a mechanic'south store, taking the pigment off cars with my easily," via Verse Foundation.

In her late teens, she began a relationship with an older man named L.D., who was married and had a gambling problem. Subsequently losing over $5,000, he convinced Angelou to work in a brothel to make enough extra coin to pay back his gambling debt. Believing they would go married once they had enough greenbacks, Angelou agreed, and for a short fourth dimension, she worked as a prostitute and madam. While some critics take pointed out that this era of Angelou's life is frequently glossed over or left out in her later biographies, Angelou herself was quite open virtually her time as a sex worker, recounting the experience her 1974 memoir Gather Together in my Name: "The faces, bodies and smells of the tricks fabricated an unending paisley pattern in my heed. [...] The potent Lysol washing water stung my eyes and a film of vapor coated my adenoids," via archive.org.

Maya Angelou had a successful dance career

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In the 1950s, Angelou turned her attention to her dance career and began performing in clubs around San Francisco. She too took modern trip the light fantastic classes, studying nether influential choreographers similar Martha Graham. While taking classes, she met famed dancer Alvin Ailey. The pair teamed upwards for a short time, dancing together as "Al and Rita," just their act never took off.

Angelou moved to New York Metropolis to study African trip the light fantastic toe for 1 year under the choreographer Pearl Primus, earlier returning to San Francisco and making a proper name for herself performing cabaret and dancing calypso at the Purple Onion, a nightclub often frequented by talent scouts, according to Poetry Foundation. At the Imperial Onion, she officially took on the stage proper 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. Later returning to America, she performed in the off-Broadway show Calypso Heat Wave and later in the play The Blacks. Angelou also began recording her calypso music performances, releasing her showtime album of calypso music, titled Miss Calypso, in 1957, per Biography.

"Come find out if y'all really are a writer"

While Angelou was performing in clubs around California, she met many influential artists and writers, including Langston Hughes and novelist John Oliver Killens. In 1959, Killens suggested she should move to New York permanently and "come detect out if you lot really are a writer," as reported by The Guardian. Angelou, who subsequently described herself equally "young enough and silly enough" to take him upward on his offer, moved to New York City and began publishing her first pieces of writing.

Angelou joined the Harlem Writers Club, where she befriended many other important writers of the time, including James Baldwin, who she would affectionately call her "brother friend," per Timeline. Baldwin, forth with editor Robert Loomis, would go on to encourage Angelou to write an autobiography. Although she was reluctant at kickoff, 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, co-ordinate to Poetry Foundation.

Maya Angelou mourned both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X

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It was also in New York where Angelou became actively engaged with the ceremonious rights movement. After hearing Martin Luther Rex Jr. speak in Harlem, Angelou 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 a "Cabaret for Liberty." The evidence raised so much money that Angelou was appointed the new manager of SCLC'south New York role, per The Nation, where she worked closely with King to organize and raise funds. Although she was living in Ghana during King's historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, she however participated, marching exterior the American Diplomatic mission in Accra in solidarity.

While in Africa, Angelou became shut with some other expatriate living in Ghana: civil rights leader Malcolm X. Together, they formed the Arrangement of African American Unity in 1964, according to The History Makers. When Malcolm X was assassinated the following year, the organization fell apart and Angelou, grieving the loss of her friend, spent the next year living in Hawaii.

Angelou returned to New York in 1967, but in a tragic twist of fate, King was assassinated on Angelou'southward 40th birthday, just every bit she was getting ready to go on a nationwide bout promoting Rex'southward Poor People's Campaign. Devastated afterwards the deaths of Malcolm X and King in such brusk succession, Angelou channeled her free energy even more than intensely into her writing.

Maya Angelou's son most died

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Angelou moved to Africa in the midst of the civil rights move. In 1961, she began dating a South African freedom fighter named Vusumzi Make. The couple, along with Angelou's son, moved to Cairo, Egypt, to proceed the fight against apartheid. While living in Egypt, Angelou wrote for a weekly radical paper called The Arab Observer, according to The History Makers.

Later the human relationship concluded in 1962, Angelou decide to motility to Ghana, where her son planned to attend college. Even so, just three days into their arrival in the country, he broke his neck in a auto accident, per the Los Angeles Times. He made a remarkable recovery and was able to proceed 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 at that place. She became shut with activists and writers like West.E.B. DuBois, William Gardner Smith, and Julian Mayfield, per Africa Is a Country. Somehow, Angelou also plant fourth dimension to teach at the Academy of Ghana'southward Schoolhouse of Music and Drama and exercise freelance work for the Ghanaian Times and Radio Ghana. Afterward another romantic relationship ended in adultery, Angelou returned to the U.s.a. to work with Malcolm Ten in 1965.

Maya Angelou had a groundbreaking moving-picture show and TV career

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While Maya Angelou might be all-time known as a poet and influential memoirist, she was also had a groundbreaking career in motion-picture show and Goggle box. She wrote the screenplay and soundtrack for the drama Georgia, Georgia in 1972 and became the first African-American woman to have a screenplay produced, co-ordinate to Poetry Foundation. Shortly afterwards, she became i of the beginning African-American women to join the Directors Guild of America, according to Time.

Angelou went on to adapt her famous autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings for tv set, and the Idiot box movie aired in 1979. She continued to aggrandize her TV career, going on to accept a supporting part in boob tube miniseries Roots, for which she won an Emmy. Angelou had further roles in movies similar Poetic Justice and How to Make an American Quilt in the 1990s, according to Britannica. In 1998, Angelou went backside the camera, making her directorial debut with the coming-of-historic period drama Down in the Delta at seventy years onetime. Never one to let age slow her downwards, she continued to act well into her seventies. Her final part on screen was as the character May in Tyler Perry's 2006 comedy movie Madea's Family Reunion, per IndieWire.

Maya Angelou'south only grandson was kidnapped

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In 1981, tragedy struck Maya Angelou'due south family. Angelou had i grandson, Colin Ashanti Johnson, with whom her son, Guy Johnson, shared custody rights with his ex-wife. Sharon Murphy, Colin's mother, had visitation rights one time a calendar month. On Apr xiii, 1981, she arrived to choice up her son, equally usual. Simply the following Dominicus, she never brought Colin home.

For the next four years, Johnson and Angelou would have no contact with Colin, and there were no leads. The stress took a toll on Johnson's health, aggravating his old neck injury so badly that he was briefly paralyzed from the cervix down. Calcium deposits and claret clots had weakened his spine so badly that he was unable to walk, and he had to undergo multiple surgeries. Johnson, still, was adamant to brand a full recovery and see his son again, declaring, "When I have my son back, I want him to run across me fine," via the Los Angeles Times.

Angelou and Johnson never stopped searching, spending thousands of dollars investigating the disappearance. On May 29, 1985, they caught a break when an associate of Murphy'due south contacted Angelou, giving her Murphy and Colin's location in Austin, Texas. Angelou contacted the government, and Murphy eventually agreed to meet. The bundled meeting took place at the home of Angelou'due south chaser in Austin, and on June half-dozen, 1985, over four years after she'd last laid eyes on him, Angelou was finally able to bring her grandson domicile.

"Face the fear/loathing at its source"

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In 1973, Maya Angelou returned to the S for the first fourth dimension since her childhood to speak at Wake Forest Academy in Winston-Salem, N Carolina. She had refused to render to the S for most of her life, saying, "I knew my heart would pause if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, nonetheless, with onetime hurts," via Ebony. Notwithstanding, somewhen, she "began to realize how severely The Southward was obsessing me," and Angelou realized she needed to "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 starting time arrived, she was one of but a few African-American professors on staff. But she was wanted to "find friends, join a church building, and add my energy to the positive movement to make this state more than information technology is today," and she certainly did and then. In 2008, Angelou alleged: "I'm not a author who teaches. I'm a instructor who writes. Only I had to work at Wake Woods to know that," via Wake Forest University.

Having found yet another fulfilling calling, Angelou was an active part of the Wake Forest academic community, teaching courses on a diverseness of subjects, including "World Poetry in Dramatic Functioning," "African Civilization and Touch on on U.South.," and "Shakespeare and the Human Condition." She continued teaching and lecturing at Wake Forest until her death at age 86.

"I've never been bored in my life"

Maya Angelou once remarked in an interview: "I see myself equally a very interested person. I've never been bored in my life," via Smithsonian Magazine. With all she accomplished in her lifetime, it's impossible to come across how she could have found time to be bored. Regardless of the troubles she'd faced in her life, Angelou remained impressively productive, writing 7 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'southward Schomburg Center for Inquiry in Black Culture in Harlem, saying, "I have always wanted my papers to be at the Schomburg. [...] It'southward a magnificent depository of all the data about the African-American experience. I am grateful that it exists so that all the children, Blackness and White, Asian, Spanish-speaking, Native Americans and Aleutian can know there is a place where they tin go and observe the truth of the people'southward history," via Jet. Maya Angelou died May 28, 2014, just her legacy continues to inspire others through her impressive body of piece of work.

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