Maya Angelou, Poet, Activist And Singular Storyteller, Dies At 86

Transcript

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Some sad news this morning, Maya Angelou has died at the age of 86. She was a poet, a performer and a political activist. She was born in St. Louis in 1928 and grew up in a segregated society that she worked so passionately to change during the civil rights era. The book that put Angelou on the literary stage was "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings," which revealed scars from her past. It was the first of a series of memoirs.

Maya Angelou went on to become an iconic figure in American culture. NPR's Lynn Neary looks back on her life.

LYNN NEARY, BYLINE: Growing up in St. Louis, Mo., and Stamps, Ark., she was Marguerite Johnson. It was her brother who first called her Maya, and the name stuck. Later she added the Angelou, a version of her first husband's name.

Angelou left a troubled childhood and the segregated world of Arkansas behind and began a career as a dancer and singer. She toured Europe in the1950s with a production of "Porgy and Bess," studied dance with Martha Graham and performed with Alvin Ailey on television. In 1957 she recorded an album called "Calypso Lady."

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PEAS AND RICE")

NEARY: Angelo recalled those days in an interview with NPR.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

MAYA ANGELOU: I was known as Miss Calypso, and when I'd forget the lyric, I's just tell the audience - I seem to have forgotten the lyric. I will now dance - and I would move around a bit.

PATRIK HENRY BASS: You just sort of imagine her in Paris, you know, in any era - like in the '20s or the '40s. I mean, she really believed that life was a banquet.

NEARY: Patrik Henry Bass is an editor at Essence Magazine. When he first read Angelou's memoir, "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings," he saw parallels in his own life in a small town in North Carolina.

Everyone in the African-American community looked up to her, he says. She was a celebrity, but she was one of them. He remembers seeing her on television and hearing her speak.

BASS: When we think of her, we often think about her books, of course, and her poems. But in the African-American community, certainly, we heard so much of her work recited, so I think about her voice. You would hear that voice, and that voice would capture a humanity, and it would - that voice would calm you in so many ways through some of the most significant challenges.

ANGELOU: You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt but still, like dust, I'll rise. Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with glue? Just 'cause I walk as if I have oil wells pumping in my living room. Just like sons and like moons, with a certainty of tides, just like hopes springing high, still I rise.

NEARY: Film director John Singleton grew up in a very different part of the country. But he remembers the effect that poem had on him as a kid.

JOHN SINGLETON: I come South Central Los Angeles, a place where we learn to puff up our chests to make ourselves bigger than we are because we have so many forces knocking us down - including some of our own. And so that poem, "Still I Rise," it pumps me up. It's something that just makes me feel better about myself, or at least made me feel better about myself when I was young.

NEARY: Singleton used the poems of Maya Angelou in his 1993 film, "Poetic Justice." Angelou also had a small part in the movie. Singleton says he thinks of Angelou as a griot - a traditional African storyteller.

SINGLETON: And we all have that one or two people in our families that just can spin a yarn, that, you know, that has a whole lot to say, and holds a lot of wisdom from walking through the world and experiencing different things. And that's the way I see Dr. Maya Angelou. She was a contemporary of Martin Luther King, a contemporary of Malcolm X and Oprah Winfrey. So she transcends so many different generations of African-American culture that have affected all of us.

JOANNE BRAXTON: She changed our culture.

NEARY: Joanne Braxton is a professor at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Braxton says Angelo's willingness to reveal the sexual abuse she suffered as a child in her memoir, "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings" was unprecedented at the time. The critical acclaim and popularity of the book opened doors for both African-American and women writers.

BRAXTON: Maya Angelou brought about a paradigm shift in American literature and culture so that the works, and the gifts, the talents of women writers, including women writers of color, could be brought to the foreground and appreciated. She created an audience by her stunning example.

NEARY: For Braxton, the world will never be quite the same without Maya Angelou.

BRAXTON: I love her. She's beloved by many, including many, many people who have never met her in person and who will never meet her in person. But she has extended herself that way so that her touch extends beyond her physical embrace. That is truly a gift and we are truly blessed to have known her through her presence and her work.

NEARY: Angelou once said she believed that life loves the liver of it, and she did live it, to the fullest. Lynn Neary, NPR News.

GREENE: This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.