Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was the pen name of the American writer and poet Marguerite Ann Johnson. Her name appears among the authors of a number of plays, films, and television shows released over more than fifty years. Maya Angelou was the recipient of numerous awards and more than thirty honorary doctorates. Her book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a chronicle of her life up to the age of 16, brought her worldwide fame.

Maya Angelou took an active part in the civil rights movement. She worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. In 1993, at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton, she read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning.”

Marguerite Ann Johnson was born on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis. Her father was a dietitian and her mother a nurse. When Marguerite was three years old, her parents divorced. Her father sent Marguerite and her four brothers to live with his paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson.

Four years later, their father brought the children back to their mother in St. Louis. At the age of eight, Marguerite was sexually abused by her mother’s friend Freeman. She confessed this to her brother, who in turn told the whole family. Freeman was found guilty, but was imprisoned for one day. Four days after his release, he was killed, probably by Marguerite’s uncle. After Freeman’s death, Marguerite remained silent for almost five years, believing that her voice had killed a man. According to her colleague Marcia Ann Gillespie, who wrote Angelou’s biography, it was during this period of silence that her love of books and literature, as well as her ability to listen and observe the world around her, was born.

After Freeman’s murder, Maya and her brother were again sent to live with their grandmother. A teacher and family friend, Bertha Flowers, helped her begin speaking again. Flowers introduced her to the works of such writers as Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Douglas Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson. When Angelou was 14, she and her brother moved in with their mother, who was then living in Oakland, California. Angelou worked as a streetcar conductor in San Francisco, and three