Maya Angelou

I chose to research Maya Angelou, an eloquent female poet whose strength of character and willingness to communicate honestly and openly through her poetry has won her international acclaim.

Born Marguerite Johnson in 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri, Angelou's family life could be described as tumultuous at best. Her parents divorced when she was only three years of age and, upon this devastating occurrence, she and her older brother Bailey were literally shipped with baggage tags identifying them from their home in Long Beach, California to their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas, a small town characterized by rampant racism.

Exceedingly tall and gangly, with knappy black hair, the young Angelou desperately wished to be a petite white woman. Her physical awkwardness caused her to be a relative introvert, constantly reading and focusing on her educational development. Angelou's academic determination reflected the maturity she possessed as a result of her endurance of multitudinous hardships. Not only was she brutally punished for wrong doings with an unforgiving leather belt, Angelou was raped by her mother's boyfriend when she was visiting family.

Despite various emotional scars, Angelou persevered and, upon graduating from Lafayette County Training School in 1940, moved back to San Francisco, California to live with her mother. At age sixteen, searching for love and reassurance, she became pregnant by a relative stranger and was forced to graduate from high school on an accelerated program, allowing her to get a job and support herself and her son, Guy. She worked as a waitress, a cook, a nightclub singer, and a dancer before she was introduced to John Killens, an author who read some of her work and coerced her to move to Harlem, New York. He then convinced her to join the Harlem Writers Guild, an alliance of African-American writers who shared and criticized one another's work. Once she arrived in Harlem, Angelou staged the play "Cabaret for Freedom," featuring only African-American actors, that raised money for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization that promoted racial equality. As a result of the play's success she was promoted to coordinator