Maya Angelou Life And Accomplishments

Many people know about Maya Angelou. These people know her as a poet, but she is also an influential speaker as well as a writer. Maya Angelou is one of the most influential African American women of all time. She is most known for her books and poems, for example, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and also Gather Together in My Name. Although Maya Angelou is most famous for these, she has one significant accomplishment that many people would not know about. In 1972, she was the first African American woman to compose a screenplay and have it filmed. The name of the film was Georgia, Georgia. All that she has written has influenced the people that she has encountered in her life. Her writings touched African American women more than any other

She was born Marguerite Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri. As a child, most of her time was spent with her brother, Bailey Johnson, and they were raised by their paternal grandmother, Momma, in Stamps, Arkansas. Her brother was the giver of her name “Maya”. At first he called her “My” due to his shortening for “My sister”, then her nickname got to be “Maya” because he happened to be reading a book about Maya Indians, and it stuck with her from then on. Living in the south, Maya Angelou faced all the brutality and racial prejudice that occurred there. Being with her grandmother, she “learned to take pride in herself and to appreciate the strong bonds that held the African-American community in the small-town, segregated South” (Watkins 15). At the young age of seven, Angelou went to visit her mother in Chicago, where she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend, and being too ashamed to speak she remained silent for 5 years. At age thirteen she began to speak to others again and she moved to San Francisco with her brother back to where they rejoined their mother. Living in Francisco, she attended Mission High School, but later on she dropped out of school to become San Francisco’s first African American female cable car conductor. Maya Angelou decided to go back to school, but in her senior year where she was sixteen and pregnant, she dropped out of school again and gave birth to a son by the name of Clyde Bailey “Guy” Johnson (Maya Angelou). As a teenager, Maya Angelou was in love with the arts. Due to her talent, she won a scholarship to study dance and drama at San Francisco’s Labor School. In the fifties, Angelou “pursued a career in dance and theater, eventually touring twenty-two countries in the cast of Porgy and Bess” (Watkins 15). All of her past talents aided her and helped expand her writing to autobiographies and poetry. Her first publication was I Know