The late great Maya Angelou certainly accomplished a great deal throughout her life - enough to fill seven emotional and thought-provoking autobiographies.
Her talents were many, and allowed her to launch successful careers in countless avenues; as a singer, actress, dancer, composer, activist, and film director. Angelou was, however, renowned first and foremost for her work as an author, playwright, and poet.
She was particularly well-known for maintaining a certain candidness around aspects of her own life. Indeed, what set her apart from her contemporaries was that Angelou was never afraid to be honest with her readers about her past.
Having spent more than four decades writing her autobiographies, it’s fair to say, her entire life is laid out for us in the form of words on paper. And yet, there are still countless facts - including those related to her incredible accomplishments, the tragedies she endured, and life-changing events she experienced - that many of us still don’t know about this extraordinary woman.
So, if you’d like to learn more about a true literary great, then do read on for seven things you most likely didn’t know about Maya Angelou.
1. Her birth name wasn’t Maya Angelou
The name Maya Angelou is printed in big capital letters on each of the 36 books she penned in her lifetime. So it may surprise you to learn that it’s not actually her real name. Her birth name is, in fact, Marguerite Annie Johnson.
She took on the new moniker as a young woman sometime in the 1950s when she began a career as a singer in Purple Onion, a nightclub in San Francisco.
But what inspired the name? Well, “Maya” was actually a nickname that her brother, Bailey Jr, used for her.
As for “Angelou”, in 1952, she married a Greek sailor named Anastasios Angelopulos and so took on “Angelou” - a shortened version of his last name - as part of her stage name. Ultimately, the name outlived her marriage to Angelopulos and stayed with her until she died in 2014.
2. She gave birth to her first child as a teenager
Angelou fell pregnant unexpectedly when she was just 16 years old, and her mother, Vivian Baxter, ultimately delivered her teenage daughter’s baby boy.
It was an interesting turn of events as Baxter had been absent for much of Angelou’s childhood. Eventually, they grew closer, and when Angelou discovered she was expecting, her mother was extremely supportive.
Speaking to Smithsonian magazine in 2003, Angelou admitted that her mom was “a terrible parent of young children.” Baxter was, however, a “great parent of a young adult.”
Angelou recalled: “When she found out I was pregnant, she said, ‘All right. Run me a bath, please.’ Well, in my family, that’s really a very nice thing for somebody to ask you to do. Maybe two or three times in my life she had asked me to run her a bath.
“So I ran her a bath and then she invited me in the bathroom. My mother sat down in the bathtub. She asked me, ‘Do you love the boy?’ I said no. ‘Does he love you?’ I said no. ‘Well, there’s no point in ruining three lives. We’re going to have us a baby.’ And she delivered [baby] Guy - because she was a nurse also.”
3. Martin Luther King was murdered on her 40th birthday
On April 4, 1968, the world lost a true great in Martin Luther King, which just so happened to be Angelou’s 40th birthday.
And in a 2014 interview with George Stroumboulopoulos, nearly five decades after King’s assassination, Angelou recalled receiving news of his death - effectively cutting short her birthday celebration.
She told the CBC host that before he died, she had made a promise to King that she would spend a month helping him raise funds for his Poor People’s Match - but told him it would have to wait until after the birthday party she planned to throw in New York.
She had been cooking in preparation for the party when a friend informed her that King had just been murdered.
“Life stopped for me for a few days. It was was terrible,” Angelous said in the interview. “I couldn’t believe that this great man, this great dream, this great dreamer, this person who dared to love everybody, could be killed before he could realize his dream. It’s terrible It’s terrible.”
4. She spoke at least five foreign languages
In the mid-1950s, Angelou played the character of Ruby in George Gershwin’s opera, Porgy and Bess. She toured several countries with the production including former Yugoslavia, France, Italy, Egypt, Greece, and Israel. And in the 1960s, she lived in both Ghana and Egypt for some time.
Having spent time in a number of countries, she was, of course, exposed to various languages, and she learned to speak several of them including Spanish, French, Italian, Arabic, and Fante, which is spoken in parts of Ghana.
5. She once worked as a pimp and a prostitute
In her 1974 memoir, Gather Together In My Name, Angelou wrote about being a pimp and a prostitute when she was a young woman.
She told Linda Wolf in a 1995 interview that the reason she had been so candid about her past as a sex worker in the book was that she didn’t want to portray an image of herself as the “perfect” person - something she says older people do far too often.
“I wrote about my experiences because I thought too many people tell young folks, ‘I never did anything wrong,’” Angelou said. “They lie like that, and then young people find themselves in situations and they think, ‘Damn, I must be a pretty bad guy. You know, my mom or dad never did anything wrong, so I’m pretty bad,’ and they can’t forgive themselves and go on with their lives.”
6. She was the first Black woman to work as a streetcar conductor in San Francisco
When Angelou was 16, she had her heart set on becoming streetcar conductor - and that she very much did.
However, it wasn’t the easiest job for her to attain, and she was initially refused an application form.
She told Oprah Winfrey in a 2013 interview she wouldn’t take no for answer - so, taking the advice of her mother, she effectively staged a sit-in.
“I sat there [at the office] for two weeks, every day,” she said. “And then after two weeks, a man came out of his office and said, ‘Come here.’ And he asked me, ‘Why do you want the job?’ I said ‘I like the uniforms.’ And I said, ‘And I like people.’ And so I got the job.”
7. She was the first Black woman to write a screenplay
It turns out that Angelou was an accomplished screenwriter as well as a poet and author, although her film work was rather sporadic and not as high-profile as her literary contributions.
Angelou did, however, make history as the first Black woman to write a screenplay for a feature film in 1972. Indeed, she penned the script for a low-budget movie titled Georgia, Georgia which follows the eponymous character, a Black musician (played by Diana Sands), who becomes romantically involved with a white photographer (played by Dirk Benedict) while she is touring Sweden.
Directed by Swedish filmmaker Stig Bjorkman, the picture premiered at the 23rd Berlin International Film Festival and was even nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
While her contribution to the project was certainly unprecedented, Angelou did not reflect positively on it in a 1990 interview in which she mentioned the movie during a discussion about her experience of racism and sexism.
“In the shape of American society,” she said, “the white male is on top, then the white female, and then the Black male, and at the bottom is the Black woman. That’s been always so.”
Relating this to Georgia, Georgia, she explained that she hadn’t been allowed to direct the movie, with the studio instead deciding to go for, according to Angelou, “a young Swedish director who hadn’t even shaken a Black person’s hand before.”