Maya Angelou

It was early 1960, in Harlem, New York.

In a church, a woman heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak.

After hearing him, she put on a show, Cabaret for Freedom, to raise funds for his organization.

That woman was Maya Angelou.

She was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri.

In 1931, her parents divorced. She and her brother Bailey were sent to their grandmother, Annie Henderson. She ran a grocery store in Stamps, Arkansas.

It was Bailey who gave her her name. "Maya" was his way of saying "my sister."

As a child, she lived through a trauma. Afterwards, she stopped speaking. For about five years, she was silent.

A woman, Mrs. Flowers, helped her find her voice again. She taught her to love poetry.

Before that, she had worked many jobs. In San Francisco, she was the first Black person to work as a cable car conductor. She sang, danced and acted. She toured with Porgy and Bess.

After her show for King, in 1960, she became coordinator of his organization in New York, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She worked there for about six months. King was grateful.

Then she left for Africa. First Cairo, in 1962, where she edited a newspaper. Then Ghana, in 1963.

In Ghana, she worked at the University of Ghana's School of Music and Drama. She wrote for Ghanaian media. It was there that she met Malcolm X.

In 1966, she returned to the United States.

She then began to write her own story. In 1969, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published. It was the first of six books about her life.

The book gave voice, from the inside, to the childhood of a Black girl in the South. The little girl who had fallen silent had found her voice.

In 1972, she became the first Black woman to have a screenplay produced, Georgia, Georgia. From 1981 until the end of her life, she taught at Wake Forest University.

In 1993, at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, she read her poem On the Pulse of Morning.

In 1996, at the United Nations, she recited another poem, The Human Family. It said:

That line echoes Ubuntu, without being the same thing. She had lived in Egypt and in Ghana. Her poem spoke of a single human family.

She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2010, and more than fifty honorary degrees.

Maya Angelou died on May 28, 2014, in North Carolina. She was 86.

A silent little girl, in a grocery store in Stamps. A woman who, years later, read a poem at a president's inauguration.