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Imagine living a life so full you wrote seven autobiographies. That’s what Maya Angelou did. The first of those books, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, launched her into the public eye as a civil rights activist, won numerous awards, was made into a movie, been translated into 17 languages, and has never gone out of print.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: January 20, 1970--
Google reports it was published in 1969, but I spoke with a representative of Angelou’s estate and was told it didn’t actually arrive on bookstore shelves until January 20, 1970, so let’s go with that. Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis in 1928. Her older brother gave her the nickname Maya to mean “Mya sister.”
Prior to writing, Angelou held myriad jobs, including singer, actor, composer, teacher, journalist, and civil rights activist. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, her friend and fellow activist James Baldwin asked her to tell the world her personal story, because Baldwin knew she had the power to change the world. And she did. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings details her life up to the age of 17.
Being a Black girl growing up in Missouri in the 1930s was no picnic, but Maya experienced horrors no human should. When she was seven, her mother’s boyfriend raped her. She told her older brother, who told everyone else. The man was sentenced to a single day in prison for the crime. Four days later, the man was found dead. It’s believed Maya’s uncles killed him.
Maya would not speak for five years.
She said, “My voice killed him; I killed that man because I told his name.” Rather than speak, she read every book in the library. “When I decided to speak, I had a lot to say,” she said. There is much more in Caged Bird; its success was immediate. It spent two years on the New York Times Bestseller list, selling over a million copies. The reason for its ongoing success is that it is more than a memoir, but a rare insight into real American life that is both heartbreaking and brave.
President Barack Obama, whose sister was named after Maya, presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. Maya Angelou died in 2014 at the age of 86.
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