Maya Angelou

Marguerite Annie Johnson was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on the fourth of April 1928. After her parents' marriage dissolved, she and her brother Bailey were sent to Stamps, Arkansas, to be raised by their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, whose steadiness in the segregated South would shape her granddaughter's sense of dignity. At age eight, while staying with her mother, she was raped by her mother's boyfriend; after the man was killed, the child fell silent for nearly five years, convinced her voice had brought about his death. In that muteness she read voraciously, and the language she absorbed would one day return to her a hundredfold.

As a young woman she moved through a remarkable succession of lives — dancer, singer, actress, and journalist who lived and worked in Cairo and Accra. Drawn into the civil rights movement, she served alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and came to know Malcolm X, lending her voice and labor to the cause of freedom.

In 1969 she published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first of seven autobiographies, which unflinchingly recounted her childhood and became a landmark of American letters. Her poetry — among it the defiant "Still I Rise" — spoke of survival and self-possession. In January 1993 she wrote and recited "On the Pulse of Morning" at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton, becoming the first Black woman to deliver a poem at a presidential inauguration and the first poet to do so since Robert Frost in 1961.

She died on the twenty-eighth of May 2014, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, honored with dozens of awards and more than fifty honorary degrees. Maya Angelou taught a wounded world that the caged bird still sings, and that a life reclaimed from silence can become a voice for the ages.