2/25/2024 0 Comments Maya angelou quotes sisters![]() She met with the American dissident leader Malcolm X in his visits to Ghana, and corresponded with him as his views evolved from the racially polarized thinking of his youth to the more inclusive vision of his maturity. ![]() (Kwaku Alston/Getty)ĭuring her years abroad, she read and studied voraciously, mastering French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and the West African language Fanti. Angelou received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. Maya Angelou is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which focused on her childhood and her early adult experiences. She served as an instructor and assistant administrator at the University of Ghana’s School of Music and Drama, worked as feature editor for The African Review and wrote for The Ghanaian Times and the Ghanaian Broadcasting Company. Angelou and Guy later moved to Ghana, where she joined a thriving group of African American expatriates. In Cairo, Angelou served as editor of the English language weekly The Arab Observer. ![]() In New York, she fell in love with the South African civil rights activist Vusumzi Make, and in 1960, the couple moved, with Angelou’s son, to Cairo, Egypt. She acted in the historic Off-Broadway production of Jean Genet’s The Blacks and wrote and performed a Cabaret for Freedom with the actor and comedian Godfrey Cambridge. She moved to New York, where she joined the Harlem Writers Guild and took her place among the growing number of young black writers and artists associated with the Civil Rights Movement. She had composed song lyrics and poems for many years, and by the end of the 1950s was increasingly interested in developing her skills as a writer. She studied modern dance with Martha Graham, danced with Alvin Ailey on television variety shows, and recorded her first record album, Calypso Lady, in 1957. She toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess in 19. Although the marriage did not last, her performing career flourished. When she began her career as a nightclub singer, she took the professional name Maya Angelou, combining her childhood nickname with a form of her husband’s name. In 1952, she married a Greek sailor named Anastasios Angelopulos. Angelou was exposed in San Francisco to the progressive social ideals that animated her later political activism. 1970: Maya Angelou walks on the beach in San Francisco. She left home at 16 and took on the difficult life of a single mother, supporting herself and her son by working as a waitress and cook, but she had not given up on her talents for music, dance, performance and poetry. She later returned to high school, but became pregnant in her senior year and graduated a few weeks before giving birth to her son, Guy. She dropped out of school in her teens to become San Francisco’s first African American female cable car conductor. Maya attended Mission High School and won a scholarship to study dance and drama at San Francisco’s Labor School, where she was exposed to the progressive ideals that animated her later political activism. Maya began to speak again at 13, when she and her brother rejoined their mother in San Francisco. ![]() 1969: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is an autobiography describing the young and early years of Maya Angelou. She fell silent and did not speak for five years. When she later heard the news that an uncle had killed her attacker, she felt that her words had killed the man. Too ashamed to tell any of the adults in her life, she confided in her brother. Unable to pronounce her name because of a stutter, Bailey called her “My” for “My sister.” A few years later, when he read a book about the Maya Indians, he began to call her “Maya,” and the name stuck.Īt age seven, while visiting her mother in Chicago, she was sexually molested by her mother’s boyfriend. She enjoyed a close relationship with her brother. ![]() She credits her grandmother and her extended family with instilling in her the values that informed her later life and career. In Stamps, the young girl experienced the racial discrimination that was the legally enforced way of life in the American South, but she also absorbed the deep religious faith and old-fashioned courtesy of traditional African American life. Her parents divorced when she was only three and she essencewas sent with her brother Bailey to live with their grandmother in the small town of Stamps, Arkansas. Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Maya Angelou in San Francisco, at the time of the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1970. ![]()
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