Her birthday is the same date as the
assassination of her friend and colleague in the US civil rights movement, Dr
Martin Luther King Jr.
Maya Angelou, who would have been 90 today 4 April, remains one of
America’s most influential writers, artists and cultural figureheads.
Her series of seven autobiographical works,
beginning with the seminal coming of age story, I Know Why the Cage Bird
Sings, overhauled the memoir genre, tackling rape, racism and trauma and
catapulted Angelou to international acclaim.
Her birthday is the same date as the assassination
of her friend and colleague in the US civil rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, whom she met in 1960
after hearing him speak.
Following the meeting, Angelou, who
was already a successful singer, organised the Cabaret for Freedom to support
Dr King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1968 Dr King asked her
to organise a civil rights march, to which she agreed, but it came shortly
before he was assassinated.
She had also become friends with
Malcolm X, who she met in Ghana, where she lived during the early 1960s,
working as a writer and editor as well as broadcasting on radio. In 1965 she
returned to the US to help him create a new civil rights organisation - the
Organisation of Afro-American Unity, but he was assassinated shortly
afterwards.
While living a life full enough to
write seven acclaimed autobiographies makes condensing Angelou’s extraordinary
life into a short article an impossible task, here are five things you may not
have known about her.
She was a professional dancer
In her early 20s, recently married and
with a young son, Angelou began studying modern dance in San Francisco. She
formed the dance team Al and Rita, before Angelou decided to move to New York
in order to study African dance with Trinidadian dancer Pearl Primus. She went
on to dance professionally in clubs in San Francisco, including at the famous
beat-era nightclub, The Purple Onion.
Her success as a calypso dancer paved
the way for Angelou to record her first album as a singer, Miss Calypso.
She won a Grammy award
Though Angelou saw success as a
singer, she won a Grammy award in 1995 not for her many musical works, but for
a recording of her poem On The Pulse of Morning, which she recited at the
inauguration of President Bill Clinton in 1993.
The recitation was the first at a
presidential inauguration since Robert Frost at President John F Kennedy’s 1961
inauguration.
She directed a film starring Wesley Snipes
Wesley Snipes, whose more famous roles
are for action films such as Demolition Man and the Blade trilogy, was among
the cast in Angelou’s 1996 film Down in the Delta.
The film explored family tragedy,
drugs, race and prejudice, and redemption.
Her writing routine involved sherry, the bible
and a deck of cards
Angelou’s writing routine remains the
stuff of legends.
According to several sources, in later
life when already a successful writer, Angelou would get up at 5am and check
into a hotel room where staff had been told to take down any pictures from the
walls.
She would then lie on the bed with a
bottle of sherry, Roget’s Thesaurus and the Bible, as well as a deck of cards
to play Solitaire with. She wrote on yellow legal pads and reportedly averaged
10-12 pages a day, which she then edited down to three or four pages in the
evening.
She wrote about working in the sex trade to
help people speak about their experiences
According to her autobiographies,
Angelou worked as a prostitute and also as a madame for lesbian prostitutes.
In a 1995 interview, she explained the
importance of writing about these subjects.
She said: “I wrote about my
experiences because I thought too many people tell young folks, 'I never did
anything wrong. Who, Moi? - never I. I have no skeletons in my closet. In fact,
I have no closet.' They lie like that and then young people find themselves in
situations and they think, 'Damn I must be a pretty bad guy. My mom or dad
never did anything wrong.' They can’t forgive themselves and go on with their
lives.”
Source: Independent
