A Junkyard Refuge for a Future Poet

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, and spent her earliest years in Long Beach, California. When she was three her parents divorced, and she and her brother Bailey were sent to Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their grandmother, Annie Henderson, who ran the town's only general store. They returned to St. Louis in 1936 and later, in 1940, moved to San Francisco, where she finished school at the top of her class and won a scholarship to evening classes in drama and dance.

The period relevant here came in her teens. During a summer spent in southern California with her father and his fiancée, a violent quarrel led her to run away. She lived for several weeks in a junkyard alongside other homeless children. She later said the experience shaped her tolerance toward others, and she wrote about the lack of criticism within that improvised community.

She returned to San Francisco and, in 1944, pushed back against discriminatory hiring on the city's streetcars to become its first Black streetcar conductor. That same year, at sixteen, she gave birth to her son, Guy. She finished at Mission High School in 1945 and worked a variety of jobs before dance led her to adopt the name Maya Angelou. In 1954 and 1955 she toured Europe with a production of Porgy and Bess.

In 1959 she moved to Brooklyn, rediscovered writing and joined the Harlem Writers Guild. She went on to work in Cairo and Accra, and with encouragement from her friend James Baldwin she wrote her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1970 and a bestseller for about two years. She later wrote six autobiographies and many volumes of poetry, read her poem On the Pulse of Morning at the 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton, and taught at Wake Forest University. She died on 28 May 2014, aged 86.