Maya Angelou

A hero to me is someone you can look up to and admire. Maya Angleou is my hero. She has faced many obstacles in her life, but she has overcome each one and that makes her a hero.

Marguerite Johnson (a.k.a. Maya Angelou) was born on April 4, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. As a child, her parents divorced and she was left with only her brother and mother. At age eight Maya was raped by her mother’s boyfriend and was traumatized for a length of time. At age twelve she began expressing her feelings through her poetry and writing.

While attending high school, she received a scholarship in dance and drama to the California Labor School. Even though she had received this scholarship, Maya still needed extra money. She soon became San Francisco’s first female African-American streetcar conductor. After finishing high school, she had her first child, a baby boy, Clyde “Guy” Johnson. Being a new mom meant she needed a job that paid money. She held a variety of jobs in San Francisco and San Diego. She applied to go into the United States Army, but was turned down for enlistment after her background check revealed that the California Labor School was, in fact, suspected by the House Un-American Activities Committee as a training ground for future communists.

In the early 1950s, Maya was married for three years to Greek-born former sailor, Tosh Angelou. She took the name and began to use it as her stage name for her debut appearance as a dancer and singer of West Indian calypso music in a San Francisco cabaret. Maya moved to New York in the late 1950s to pursue her acting and singing careers. She also began to develop an interest in politics and civil rights. In 1960, Maya wrote a revue called Freedom Cabaret, which she and her friend, Godfrey Cambridge, produced in order to raise money for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She became the northern coordinator of the SCLC in 1961.

Maya later moved to Egypt with her new husband, the South African dissident lawyer Vusumzi Make. In Cairo, she worked for an English-language publication, the Arab Observer. Her marriage to Make ended in 1963, and Maya moved to the newly independent nation of Ghana, where her son was attending collage. Here she worked as a teacher at the University of Ghana’s music and drama school and as a writer and editor for the African Review and the Ghanaian Times. She returned to Los Angeles in 1966, where she wrote a two-act play, The Least of These, and a ten-part television series, Black, Blues, Black (broadcast by National Educational Television in 1968) that dealt with the role of African culture in American life.

Maya published her first book, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, in 1970. This story focused on the first seventeen years of her life, up until the birth of her son. The book got astonishing critical acclaim and was a popular success. Since then, Maya has become one of the most celebrated writers in America and a distinctive voice of African-American culture in particular. Maya is truly my hero because she has accomplished many goals for herself. She had a pretty rough life, but she never gave up.