Author and poet Maya Angelou dies
Celebrated African-American author, poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou has died at the age of 86.
Angelou is best known for memoirs that focused on her childhood and early adulthood, including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – the first non-fiction best-seller by an African-American woman.
A friend of slain civil rights hero Martin Luther King, she was widely respected in the US and abroad as a strong voice for both black people and women.
Her son Guy Johnson said his mother “passed quietly in her home” on Wednesday in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and expressed thanks that “her ascension was not belaboured by a loss of acuity or comprehension”.
“She lived a life as a teacher, activist, artist and human being. She was a warrior for equality, tolerance and peace,” he said in a statement.
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“The family is extremely appreciative of the time we had with her and we know that she is looking down upon us with love,” he said.
She had reportedly been in poor health recently and cancelled a scheduled appearance in Texas later this week where she was to accept an honour.
“Listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of God,” she wrote in what would become her last message on her @DrMayaAngelou Twitter account, posted on May 23.
Born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928, in Saint Louis, Missouri, Angelou experienced hardship from an early age, including being raped at the age of seven or eight at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend.
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She moved to San Francisco during World War II to study dance and acting, where she also held down a number of odd jobs to support herself and a baby son, including a stint as the city’s first black female cable car conductor.
In the early 1950s she briefly married a Greek sailor named Angelopulos and tweaked his surname to come up with her own professional name and in the same decade performed in off-Broadway theatre and in a touring production of Porgy and Bess.
At the same time she became increasingly involved in the nascent civil rights movement, getting to know many of its key figures.
In the 1960s she travelled abroad, particularly in Egypt and Ghana.
Upon returning to the United States, the African-American author James Baldwin encouraged her to put pen to paper with her remarkable life story – encouragement that led to the 1969 publication of “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” covering the first 17 years of her life.
Other books and poems followed, as well as a screenplay (the 1972 Swedish-American drama “Georgia, Georgia”) and an Emmy-nominated turn on the breakthrough US television miniseries “Roots” in 1977.
In January 1993, a newly-elected Bill Clinton invited her to recite one of her most famous poems, “On the Pulse of the Morning,” at his presidential inauguration.
Praised as a Renaissance woman, Angelou made her debut as a director with the 1998 film “Down in the Delta,” about a young big-city drug addict dispatched to the ancestral home in rural Mississippi where she discovers her family roots.
Barack Obama, the first African-American president, presented Angelou with the nation’s highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2011.
A speaker of French, Arabic and Latin, Angelou taught American studies at Wake Forest University for many years, but she herself never went to college.
