Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Ann Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928. In 1931, when she was three years old, her parents divorced and she and her 4-year old brother, Bailey, were sent alone, by train, to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. While living with her grandmother, Angelou participated in a wide variety of dance classes including tap, jazz, foxtrot, and salsa. After four years in Stamps, the children returned to their mother's care. At age eight, Angelou confessed that her mother's boyfriend had sexually abused her, and Angelou's uncles beat the man to death. Horrified by the outcome, she became mute, believing, as she has stated, that "the power of [her] words led to someone's death." She remained nearly mute for another five years, at which point her mother sent the children to live with their grandmother once again. Angelou credits a close friend in Stamps, Mrs. Flowers, for helping her "refind her voice". She began to speak again at age 13. During one of her first bouts of activism, Angelou persisted at age 15 in becoming the first black person hired on the San Francisco streetcars.

In 1940, while spending the summer with her father in the Los Angeles area, Angelou was assaulted by her father's live-in girlfriend, which led to her running away from home and spending a month as a resident of a junk yard that housed other homeless children. She finally called her mother and was sent a ticket back home to San Francisco, but her month of homelessness had a profound effect on her way of looking at the world. As she says in p. 254 of Caged Bird, "After a month my thinking processes had so changed that I was hardly recognizable to myself. The unquestioning acceptance of my peers had dislodged the familiar insecurity...After hunting down unbroken bottles and selling them with a white girl from Missouri, a Mexican girl from Los Angeles and a Black girl from Okalahoma, I was never again to sense myself so solidly outside the pale of the human race. The lack of criticism evidenced by our ad hoc community influenced me, and set a tone of tolerance in my life."

Angelou became pregnant at the age of 16 and gave birth to her son, Guy Johnson, who also became a poet later in life. To support herself, she sang, with an affected Caribbean accent, at Enrico Banducci's famed hungry i San Francisco nightclub. During this phase of her career she released a record