MINNEAPOLIS – She never attended college as a student, but everyone that acknowledged her happily called her “doctor.” She lived a life marked by heartache, tragedy and grand misjudgment, but her legacy is one of triumph. She was never modest, but she showed the world how to be humble.
She bore many lives, had many careers and witnessed the many faces of the tumultuous times she lived through. But to those affected by her words and her voice, she was the woman that challenged and changed the perceived perspective of the black experience in modern America.
Her death reverberated not only through the poetry world, but through the halls of academia, the political community and American society as a whole.
“Maya Angelou is among the first African-American writers I read in graduate school. Her autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” spoke of physical, emotional and mental suffering that I could not fathom,” Ngwarsungu Chiwengo, professor of English at Creighton University, told MintPress News.
“I have admired her courage to write about being raped, especially since rape was supposed to be kept silent in my African environment. I have admired her for teaching black women to love themselves and their bodies in “Phenomenal Woman” and teaching us to thank God for His love, to forgive those who have wronged us and that ‘none of us make it out here alone.’”
From Marguerite Johnson to Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou’s legacy can only be fully appreciated through understanding the road her life took. As told in “Maya Angelou: A Glorious Celebration,” a 2005 biography written by Marcia Ann Gillespie, Rosa Butler and Richard Long, Angelou was born Marguerite Ann Johnson on April 4, 1928 in St. Louis, Mo. Angelou received the nickname “Maya” from her older brother Bailey, who called her “Mya Sister.” With the exception of a four-year interlude when she and her brother stayed with her paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, Angelou’s early childhood was grotesque in its brutality. At the age of eight, Angelou was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. While her rapist was convicted, he was sentenced to only one year in prison. Four days after his release, Angelou’s rapist was stomped to death, allegedly by her uncles.
The shock of the situation rendered Angelou mute for five years. Angelou was under the impression that because she spoke up about her rape, a man was killed, and therefore, her voice was a weapon. It was during this time — when she couldn’t talk to anyone — that she developed a love of literature and her intuitive curiosity of the world. Following the murder, she returned to her grandmother’s house where a family friend, Bertha Flowers, introduced Angelou to the works of William Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe and James Weldon Johnson. Flowers also introduced Angelou to the black female artist community, where Angelou studied Frances Harper and Jessie Fauset.
According to Angelou’s 1974 autobiography, “Gather Together in My Name,” after she gave birth to her son Clyde (now called Guy) at the age of 17, Angelou was forced to endure the struggles common to black single mothers. This led her to be a cook, a stripper and a pimp, jumping from job to job, relationship to relationship and city to city in her attempts to raise her son without any significant education or job training.
In 1951, Angelou married Greek electrician and aspiring musician Tosh Angelos — her first of three marriages — despite the disapproval of her mother and took modern dance lessons. By 1954, Angelou was divorced and dancing professionally at nightclubs in San Francisco, where she took the stage name “Angelou,” as it sounded more distinctive and in line with calypso than “Johnson.”
A woman, phenomenally
From 1954 to 1959, Angelou toured Europe with a production of “Porgy and Bess” — and learned several languages while doing so — performed in the off-Broadway review “Calypso Heat Wave” and recorded her first album, “Miss Calypso” — which was originally released in 1957 and re-released on CD in 1996.
In 1959, Angelou embarked on her writing career, moving to New York and joining the Harlem Writers Guild. In 1960, after hearing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., speak and co-ordinating the “Cabaret for Freedom” to benefit the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, she was named the SCLC’s Northern Coordinator.
From 1961 to 1969, Angelou and her son continued their international travels. In 1961, Angelou was cast in the play “The Blacks,” alongside Roscoe Lee Brown, James Earl Jones, Louis Gossett and Cicely Tyson. Following this, she moved to Cairo, Egypt, to work as an editor for the Arab Observer. In 1962, she moved to Accra, Ghana, where her son attended college, and she served as an administrator for the University of Ghana and a freelancer for The Ghanaian Times newspaper and Radio Ghana. While in Ghana, she met and befriended Malcolm X and, once back in the United States, planned to help Malcolm X — who went by El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz at this point in his life — establish the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Malcolm X’s assassination, however, ended the plans and left Angelou emotionally shattered.
While working as a market researcher in Los Angeles in 1965, she witnessed the Watts Riots. In 1968, King called on Angelou to organize a march, which she agreed to but hesitated with. This postponement proved costly, as King was assassinated before Angelou could start the protest march. King died on Angelou’s 40th birthday. Later that year, Angelou would write, produce, and narrate “Blacks, Blues, Black!” — a series of documentaries about the black experience and blues music — for National Educational Television, the precursor to the Public Broadcasting Service.
Based on a challenge by a Random House editor, she wrote her first autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” which won her critical acclaim. In the years following, she wrote the first movie screenplay written by a black woman, composed for singers such as Roberta Flack and for a number of movie scores, wrote a virtual library of television scripts, articles, documentaries, autobiographies and poetry, and continued to act on television and on the stage, appearing in a supporting role in “Roots.”
In 1981, she was named the lifetime Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University, and in 1993, she became the only poet since Robert Frost to recite a poem at a presidential inauguration.
“But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”
Despite this litany of accomplishments and deeds, her true achievement lies in the scores of people she inspired. In the 1970s, Angelou met a young Baltimore television anchor named Oprah Winfrey and became a close friend to her. Winfrey, who is now the wealthiest black person alive and heads both a production company and a media conglomerate, credits Angelou as her mentor and spiritual guide.
Winfrey is far from alone in crediting Angelou as their inspiration. Angelou emerged at a time when the Harlem Renaissance had run its course and the black community was looking for a new voice. Angelou both led the way for and joined Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Bambara, Ntozake Shange and others that successfully argued that the story of Black America — and particularly, black women — is not just a story worthy of being told, but one that deserves to be told separate from the framed perspective of White America. Angelou and her class of fellow writers and artists argued that the black experience need not be defined through white eyes; blacks have every right to tell their stories in their words with black being the focus.
“As a middle schooler in Cincinnati, Ohio, I was bombarded with images, words, and ideas that rarely reflected my experience,” said Aimee Meredith Cox, cultural anthropologist and assistant professor of performance and African-American studies at Fordham University. “When we — black girls and boys — discovered Maya Angelou, we found a way to write ourselves in, we were given permission to love ourselves despite the ways we were silenced and unseen. She revealed that the blueprint for loving all human beings could be found in our ability to live our lives without fear.”
Angelou was always cognizant of the power of her voice, and throughout her life she drove to remind others of the power of theirs. While in her youth she saw only the destructive nature of her words, she later embraced their ability to teach, to inspire and to heal. More importantly, she embraced her voice’s ability to chronicle the change and struggles of her time, from both microscopic and macroscopic points-of-view.
She was a citizen of the world, yet her life was quintessentially American. She was an actress, a film director, a civil rights leader, a singer, a dancer, a memoirist, a poet, a screenwriter and a professor and, at 6 feet tall, she both metaphorically and literally towered over most who shared the stage with her.
Most important, she taught the world — and blacks, in particular — that it doesn’t matter that someone stumbled or fell along the way, but that he or she got up and tried again. She taught that there is a beauty in the chaos of the world that must be embraced, and as humans are part of that chaos, every single person is also beautiful and worthy of praise. In all things, one must learn resilience and self-determination and that one’s worth is defined by the person, not society.
“Maya Angelou — in the tradition of Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass and slave narratives — is a writer who wrote for the entirety of humanity and against cruelty in all its practiced forms, who believed in a kind of radical all-encompassing love,” said Dawn Lonsinger, visiting assistant professor of English at Muhlenberg College.
“Some critics have read Angelou’s writings as overly sentimental or glib, but this is only possible when you decontextualize her work from her life and the period of civic unrest she rose up through and fought within,” she told MintPress. “When you put her tremendous body of work up against the difficult truths of her time, you see that she is a writer who turned the anarchy of grief into a humanizing force, that she works within what Czeslaw Milosz called ‘A Poetics of Hope,’ wherein writers remain hopeful despite an intense awareness of the dangers menacing what they love.
“Hers is a literature that gives us permission to bear witness to difficult truths and to transcend that difficulty, to again and again, ‘like dust, I’ll rise.’”