Birthday: Maya Angelou, born in 1928

January 20, 1993, Maya Angelou read a poem at the inauguration of the President of the United States.

Margalit Fox wrote in The New York Times,

Long before that day, as she recounted in “Caged Bird” and its sequels, she had already been a dancer, calypso singer, streetcar conductor, single mother, magazine editor in Cairo, administrative assistant in Ghana, official of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and friend or associate of some of the most eminent black Americans of the mid-20th century, including James Baldwin, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. 

Afterward (her six-volume memoir takes her only to age 40), Ms. Angelou was a Tony-nominated stage actress; college professor (she was for many years the Reynolds professor of American studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem); ubiquitous presence on the lecture circuit; frequent guest on television shows from “Oprah” to “Sesame Street”; and subject of a string of scholarly studies.

After her parents divorced, she and her brother were sent to live with a grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas, which, she recalled,  “with its dust and hate and narrowness was as South as it was possible to get.” On a visit to St. Louis, at seven or eight, Angelou was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. He was convicted and sentenced but was murdered (by her uncles, she held) before he could begin serving. Believing she had caused his death with her words, Angelou stopped talking and did not resume for five years.

She patched together a life out of the most unpromising beginnings, becoming a single mother in her late teens. She worked as a nightclub dancer, a Creole restaurant cook, a fry cook, an auto paint remover, and a sex worker. She married a Greek sailor; they divorced, and she became a calypso dancer as Maya Angelou- a variant of his surname (Her obituary notes, “Throughout her life, she was cagey about the number of times she married — it appears to have been at least three — for fear, she said, of appearing frivolous”).

A commanding presence, six feet high, she did a nightclub act for a while with the modern dance pioneer Alvin Ailey. She turned down a Broadway role for a world tour as a dancer in “Porgy and Bess” in 1954. Angelou did a stint as New York coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, succeeding Bayard Rustin, then moved to Africa. She was associate editor of an English-language newspaper in Cairo, and then an administrator at the University of Ghana.

Returning to America, Angelou worked with Malcolm X the last year of his life while pursuing her goal of becoming a writer. In 1973 she was cast in a Broadway show about Mary Lincoln and her dresser, Elizabeth Keckley; though the show closed after one performance hers was so compelling it won her a Tony nomination. She was Kunta KInte’s grandmother in the miniseries, “Roots” and had a number of other movie roles through the 1990s.

The publication of her first memoir, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (1969) was a bestseller, and opened doors in every direction. A spellbinding speaker, she was a tireless lecturer and won two Tony nominations for recordings of her work, and three for writing. She wrote seven plays and five TV and film screenplays; produced and directed numerous PBS documentaries; hosted a radio show on XM; and became a ubiquitous television presence, especially with Oprah Winfrey.

Angelou served on the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission and the Commission on the International Women’s Year, was a member of the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina, and, from 1982 to her death, on the Wake Forest faculty.

Though she wanted to be known as a poet, and won a Pulitzer nomination for one of her twelve collections, it was her memoirs that won her renown. Some critics faulted her fictionalized narrative technique, and found her style wanting, but she was perceived and appreciated as an authentic voice of her time. Over fifty colleges and universities gave her honorary degrees.

Angelou’s published work ran to cover sixty volumes, including children's books, plays, essays, poetry and autobiography, Her articles were virtually innumerable. By the 1990s, she was one of the best-known authors in America, and a beloved figure across the world.