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Maya Angelou
As little of you know, writer, poet, performer, and director Maya Angelou had a rough childhood. Born Marguerite Johnson, on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri. After her parents’ marriage broke up, Angelou and her older brother, who gave her the nickname “Maya,” moved to the rural town of Stamps, Arkansas to live with their paternal grandmother. In the mid-1930s, after the two children had returned to St. Louis to live with their mother, her mother’s boyfriend raped the seven-year-old Angelou. A few days after she was forced to testify at his trial, her rapist was found beaten to death in an alley, apparently murdered by some of Angelou’s uncles. Traumatized by the whole experience, Angelou stopped speaking altogether, and she and her brother moved back to Arkansas.
Through her study of writing, literature, and music, Angelou gained the will to speak again, and by the age of 12, she became known in the town of Stamps for her precocious intelligence. She moved to San Francisco in 1940 to live with her mother, who had remarried. While attending high school, she won a scholarship in dance and drama to the California Labor School. In addition to her studies, Angelou worked to earn extra money, becoming San Francisco’s first African-American and first female streetcar conductor. Just after she graduated from high school in 1945, her son, Clyde “Guy” Johnson, was born. She held a succession of jobs in San Francisco and San Diego—where she worked as a nightclub waitress and as a madam for two prostitutes—and was turned down for enlistment in the United States Army after her background check revealed that the California Labor School was in fact suspected by the House Un-American Activities Committee as a training ground for future Communists.
In the early 1950s, Angelou was married for three years to a Greek-born former sailor, Tosh Angelos; she took a variation of his name as her stage name for her debut appearance as a dancer and singer of West Indian calypso music in a San Francisco cabaret. She also worked as a dancer in a touring production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, with which she toured 22 countries in Europe and Asia. In 1955, Angelou returned to California and began touring with her cabaret act on the West Coast and Hawaii.
Angelou moved to New York in the late 1950s to pursue her acting and singing careers, appearing in an off-Broadway play Calypso Heatwave (1957) and recording an album of calypso music. She also attended meetings of the Harlem Writers Guild and began to develop an interest in politics and civil rights. In 1960, Angelou wrote a revue called Freedom Cabaret, which she and her friend Godfrey Cambridge produced, directed, and starred in, in order to raise money for Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She became the northern coordinator of the SCLC in 1961.
Angelou later moved to Egypt with her new husband, the South African dissident lawyer Vusumzi Make; in Cairo, she worked as an editor [next page]