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Letters, Arts & Sciences · Literature

Maya Angelou

1928 – 2014

Poet, memoirist, performer, and activist. Author of seven autobiographies beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969).

Maya Angelou reciting her poem On the Pulse of Morning at the presidential inauguration, 20 January 1993
White House staff photographer, 20 January 1993. William J. Clinton Presidential Library via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain

Maya Angelou lived several careers — dancer, singer, journalist in Africa, civil rights organizer, playwright, and professor — before and alongside the seven autobiographies that made her one of the most widely read American writers of her time. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) broke open what a Black woman’s memoir could say about racism and sexual violence, and her reading of “On the Pulse of Morning” at the 1993 presidential inauguration made her a national voice.

At a Glance

Born
4 April 1928, St. Louis, Missouri
Died
28 May 2014, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
Birth name
Marguerite Johnson
Known for
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969); “On the Pulse of Morning” (1993); seven volumes of autobiography
Fields
Literature · Civil Rights · Education
Era
Letters, Arts & Sciences

Early Life

Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on 4 April 1928, to Bailey Johnson and Vivian Baxter Johnson. After her parents’ marriage ended, she and her older brother, Bailey, were sent as small children to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, who ran a general store in the segregated town of Stamps, Arkansas. It was her brother who gave her the name Maya.

By her own account, at age eight, while staying with her mother in St. Louis, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. After she testified against him he was killed, and, believing her words had caused his death, she stopped speaking for about five years. Back in Stamps, a family friend, Bertha Flowers, drew her back to speech through books and poetry. As a teenager she moved to San Francisco to live with her mother, where she worked as a streetcar conductor, by her account breaking the color line in that job, and gave birth to her son, Guy, shortly after finishing high school.

Life and Work

Through the late 1940s and 1950s she supported herself and her son in a series of jobs, from cook to nightclub dancer. In 1951 she married Tosh Angelos, and she later combined a form of his surname with her nickname to create the stage name Maya Angelou. She performed calypso and dance at San Francisco’s Purple Onion, toured Europe and North Africa with a State Department–sponsored production of Porgy and Bess in 1954 and 1955, and recorded the album Calypso Lady in 1957. In New York she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, the workshop where she began to write seriously.

In 1960, after hearing Martin Luther King Jr. speak, she helped stage Cabaret for Freedom, a benefit revue for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and then served as the SCLC’s northern coordinator. In the early 1960s she moved to Africa, working as an editor for The Arab Observer in Cairo and then in Accra, Ghana, as a writer for The African Review and an administrator at the University of Ghana. There she came to know Malcolm X, and she returned to the United States intending to help him build the Organization of Afro-American Unity shortly before his assassination in February 1965. King was assassinated on her fortieth birthday, 4 April 1968.

In 1968 she wrote and hosted Blacks, Blues, Black!, a ten-part series on African American culture for National Educational Television. Encouraged by James Baldwin and other friends, she also wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published by Random House in 1969. The book traces her life from Stamps to the birth of her son and was nominated for the National Book Award in 1970. It became a bestseller and, because of its account of rape, also one of the books most often challenged in American schools. Over the next four decades six more volumes followed, carrying the story forward into her years in Africa and beyond: Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002), and Mom & Me & Mom (2013).

Her poetry collection Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Diiie (1971) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She wrote the screenplay for the film Georgia, Georgia (1972), received a Tony nomination for her Broadway performance in Look Away in 1973, and an Emmy nomination for her role in the television miniseries Roots (1977). In 1981 she accepted a lifetime appointment as the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and began teaching there in 1982. On 20 January 1993 she read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at the first inauguration of President Bill Clinton, becoming the first poet to read at a presidential inauguration since Robert Frost in 1961.

Legacy

Angelou received the National Medal of Arts in 2000, and on 15 February 2011 President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At the ceremony Obama noted that his own mother had named his sister, Maya, after her. Her ties to Wake Forest began with a 1971 lecture in Wait Chapel and an honorary degree in 1977, and in 2002 the university’s School of Medicine established the Maya Angelou Center for Health Equity in her honor. She died at her home in Winston-Salem on 28 May 2014, at age 86.

In 2022 she became the first honoree of the U.S. Mint’s American Women Quarters program, the first Black woman depicted on a U.S. quarter. Her autobiographies, which combined the craft of fiction with the obligations of testimony, helped establish the Black woman’s memoir as a central American form, and Caged Bird remains among the most widely read and most frequently challenged books in American schools.

For Educators

Angelou’s autobiographies joined the craft of fiction to the obligations of testimony, making the Black woman’s memoir a central American literary form. Open the classroom lesson →

Key Dates

  1. 4 April 1928 Born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri.
  2. 1954–1955 Tours Europe with a production of Porgy and Bess.
  3. 1960 Stages Cabaret for Freedom; becomes northern coordinator of the SCLC.
  4. Early 1960s Works as a journalist and editor in Cairo and Accra, Ghana.
  5. 1969 Publishes I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
  6. 1971 Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Diiie is nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
  7. 1981 Named first Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University.
  8. 20 January 1993 Reads “On the Pulse of Morning” at President Clinton’s inauguration.
  9. 15 February 2011 Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
  10. 28 May 2014 Dies at home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Sources and Further Reading

  1. NCpedia, “Angelou, Maya,” State Library of North Carolina. Link
  2. Wake Forest University, “Angelou receives Medal of Freedom,” Inside WFU, February 2011. Link
  3. The White House (Obama administration), “2010 Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient – Maya Angelou.” Link
  4. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New York: Random House, 1969).
  5. Maya Angelou, The Heart of a Woman (New York: Random House, 1981).

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By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.

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