Who Was Maya Angelou [Paperback]

Born in Missouri in 1928, Maya Angelou had a difficult childhood. Jim Crow laws segregated blacks and whites in the South. Her family life was unstable at times. But much like her poem, Still I Rise, Angelou was able to lift herself out of her situation and flourish. She moved to California and became the first black—and first female—streetcar operator before following her interest in dance. She became a professional performer in her twenties and toured the U.S. and Europe as an opera star and calypso dancer. But Angelou's writing became her defining talent. Her poems and books, includingI Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, brought her international acclaim.Ellen Labrecque is a former Senior Editor for Sports Illustrated for Kids and the author of over twenty nonfiction books for young readers, including biographies of Jim Thorpe and Magic Johnson.

Who Was Maya Angelou?
 
January 20, 1993, was a sunny and crisp winter day in Washington, DC. Maya Angelou, a six-foot-
tall, sixty-four-year-old African American woman, stood on the steps of the Capitol Building. She wore a black coat, bright red lipstick, and gold hoop earrings. It was the day that America’s forty-second president, William Jefferson Clinton, was taking office.
 
Maya was about to read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” in front of two hundred fifty thousand people. Millions more watched on their televisions at home.It had been thirty-two years since a poem had been read at a presidential inauguration. She was the first African American and the first woman ever to do so. Despite being a prizewinning writer, she felt nervous.
 
“I tried not to realize where I was,” she said later.
 
The crowd became silent and spellbound. She spoke powerfully in a deep voice that rose up and down like ocean waves as she read each line of her poem. The words called for peace and friendship between people around thelÓÎ