More on Maya!

More on Maya!

BLOG SESSION

December 14th, 2017 

Maya Angelou ~ Adulthood and early career:   1951-1961

Welcome back Poets & Poetry Lovers ~ We are back for another great Blog Session with More on Maya!

Maya Angelou has a deep background that we began going over in our last Session.  This afternoon we are going to continue our discussion about Maya Angelou with more information about her adulthood and early career during the years 1951-1961.  You'll be amazed at what you are about to learn about the extensive background that Maya Angelou possessed!

At this point, please grab your Journal and ink pen or pencil (whichever you prefer) to take notes . . .

Journal Notes

~ Maya Angelou ~

Adulthood and early career: 1951–1961

In 1951, Angelou married Greek electrician, former sailor, and aspiring musician Tosh Angelos, despite the condemnation of interracial relationships at the time and the disapproval of her mother.  She took modern dance classes during this time, and met dancers and choreographers Alvin Ailey and Ruth Beckford.  Angelou and Ailey formed a dance team, calling themselves "Al and Rita", and performed modern dance at fraternal black organizations throughout San Francisco, but never became successful.  Angelou, her new husband, and her son moved to New York City so she could study African dance with Trinidadian dancer Pearl Primus, but they returned to San Francisco a year later.

After Angelou's marriage ended in 1954, she danced professionally in clubs around San Francisco, including the nightclub the Purple Onion, where she sang and danced to calypso music.  Up to that point she went by the name of "Marguerite Johnson", or "Rita", but at the strong suggestion of her managers and supporters at the Purple Onion she changed her professional name to "Maya Angelou" (her nickname and former married surname), a "distinctive name" that set her apart and captured the feel of her calypso dance performances.  During 1954 and 1955, Angelou toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess.  She began her practice of learning the language of every country she visited, and in a few years she gained proficiency in several languages.  In 1957, riding on the popularity of calypso, Angelou recorded her first album, Miss Calypso, which was reissued as a CD in 1996.  She appeared in an off-Broadway review that inspired the 1957 film Calypso Heat Wave, in which Angelou sang and performed her own compositions.

Angelou met novelist John Oliver Killens in 1959 and, at his urging, moved to New York to concentrate on her writing career.  She joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she met several major African-American authors, including John Henrik Clarke, Rosa Guy, Paule Marshall, and Julian Mayfield, and was published for the first time.  In 1960, after meeting civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and hearing him speak, she and Killens organized "the legendary" Cabaret for Freedom to benefit the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and she was named SCLC's Northern Coordinator.  According to scholar Lyman B. Hagen, her contributions to civil rights as a fundraiser and SCLC organizer were successful and "eminently effective".  Angelou also began her pro-Castro and anti-apartheid activism during this time.

Africa to Caged Bird: 1961–69

In 1961, Angelou performed in Jean Genet's play The Blacks, along with Abbey Lincoln, Roscoe Lee Brown, James Earl Jones, Louis Gossett, Godfrey Cambridge, and Cicely Tyson.  Also in 1961, she met South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make; they never officially married.  She and her son Guy moved with Make to Cairo, where Angelou worked as an associate editor at the weekly English-language newspaper, The Arab Observer.  In 1962, her relationship with Make ended, and she and Guy moved to Accra, Ghana so he could attend college, but he was seriously injured in an automobile accident.  Angelou remained in Accra for his recovery and ended up staying there until 1965.  She became an administrator at the University of Ghana, and was active in the African-American expatriate community.  She was a feature editor for The African Review, a freelance writer for the Ghanaian Times, wrote and broadcast for Radio Ghana, and worked and performed for Ghana's National Theatre.  She performed in a revival of The Blacks in Geneva and Berlin.

In Accra, she became close friends with Malcolm X during his visit in the early 1960s.  Angelou returned to the U.S. in 1965 to help him build a new civil rights organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity; he was assassinated shortly afterward.  Devastated and adrift, she joined her brother in Hawaii, where she resumed her singing career, and then moved back to Los Angeles to focus on her writing career.  She worked as a market researcher in Watts and witnessed the riots in the summer of 1965.  She acted in and wrote plays, and returned to New York in 1967.  She met her lifelong friend Rosa Guy and renewed her friendship with James Baldwin, whom she had met in Paris in the 1950s and called "my brother", during this time.  Her friend Jerry Purcell provided Angelou with a stipend to support her writing.

In 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. asked Angelou to organize a march.  She agreed, but "postpones again", and in what Gillespie calls "a macabre twist of fate", he was assassinated on her 40th birthday (April 4).  Devastated again, she was encouraged out of her depression by her friend James Baldwin.  As Gillespie states, "If 1968 was a year of great pain, loss, and sadness, it was also the year when America first witnessed the breadth and depth of Maya Angelou's spirit and creative genius".  Despite having almost no experience, she wrote, produced, and narrated Blacks, Blues, Black!, a ten-part series of documentaries about the connection between blues music and black Americans' African heritage, and what Angelou called the "Africanisms still current in the U.S." for National Educational Television, the precursor of PBS.  Also in 1968, inspired at a dinner party she attended with Baldwin, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and his wife Judy, and challenged by Random House editor Robert Loomis, she wrote her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1969, which brought her international recognition and acclaim.

SPECIAL NOTE:

Evidence suggests that Angelou was partially descended from the Mende people of West Africa.  A 2008 PBS documentary found that Angelou's maternal great-grandmother Mary Lee, who had been emancipated after the Civil War, became pregnant by her white former owner, John Savin.  Savin forced Lee to sign a false statement accusing another man of being the father of her child.  After Savin was indicted for forcing Lee to commit perjury, and despite the discovery that Savin was the father, a jury found him not guilty.  Lee was sent to the Clinton County poorhouse in Missouri with her daughter, Marguerite Baxter, who became Angelou's grandmother.  Angelou described Lee as "that poor little Black girl, physically and mentally bruised."

Angelou had one son Guy, whose birth was described in her first autobiography, one grandson, and two great-grandchildren, and according to Gillespie, a large group of friends and extended family.  Angelou's mother Vivian Baxter died in 1991 and her brother Bailey Johnson, Jr., died in 2000 after a series of strokes; both were important figures in her life and her books.  In 1981, the mother of her son Guy's child disappeared with Angelou's grandson; it took four years to find him.

About Maya Angelou's Death 

Maya Angelou died on the morning of May 28, 2014.  She was found by her nurse.  Although Angelou had reportedly been in poor health and had canceled recent scheduled appearance, she was working on another book, an autobiography about her experiences with national and world leaders.  During her memorial service at Wake Forest University, her son Guy Johnson stated that despite being in constant pain due to her dancing career and respiratory failure, she wrote four books during the last ten years of her life.  He said, "She left this mortal plane with no loss of acuity and no loss in comprehension".

Maya Angelou's Funeral

Tributes to Angelou and condolences were paid by artists, entertainers, and world leaders, including President Bill Clinton, and President Barack Obama, whose sister was named after Angelou.  Harold Augenbraum, from the National Book Foundation, said that Angelou's "legacy is one that all writers and readers across the world can admire and aspire to."  The week after Angelou's death, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings rose to #1 on Amazon.com's bestseller list.

On May 29, 2014, Mount Zion Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, of which Angelou was a member for 30 years, held a public memorial service to honor Angelou.  On June 7, a private memorial service was held at Wait Chapel on the campus of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem.  The memorial was shown live on local stations in the Winston-Salem/Triad area and streamed live on the university web site with speeches from her son, Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, and Bill Clinton.  On June 15, a memorial was held at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, where Angelou was a member for many years. Rev. Cecil Williams, Mayor Ed Lee, and former mayor Willie Brown spoke.

In 2015 a United States Postal stamp was issued commemorating Maya Angelou with the Joan Walsh Anglund quote "A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song", though the stamp mistakenly attributes the quote to Angelou.  The quote is from Anglund's book of poems A Cup of Sun (1967).

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Until we meet again back here on the Blog . . .

Peace, Love & Light

By René Allen

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