#FRIENDS QUOTES MAYA ANGELOU PROFESSIONAL#

She had composed song lyrics and poems for many years, and by the end of the 1950s was increasingly interested in developing her skills as a writer. She studied modern dance with Martha Graham, danced with Alvin Ailey on television variety shows, and recorded her first record album, Calypso Lady, in 1957. She toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess in 19. Although the marriage did not last, her performing career flourished.

#FRIENDS QUOTES MAYA ANGELOU PROFESSIONAL#

When she began her career as a nightclub singer, she took the professional name Maya Angelou, combining her childhood nickname with a form of her husband’s name.

In 1952, she married a Greek sailor named Anastasios Angelopulos. Angelou was exposed in San Francisco to the progressive social ideals that animated her later political activism.

1970: Maya Angelou walks on the beach in San Francisco. She left home at 16 and took on the difficult life of a single mother, supporting herself and her son by working as a waitress and cook, but she had not given up on her talents for music, dance, performance and poetry. She later returned to high school, but became pregnant in her senior year and graduated a few weeks before giving birth to her son, Guy. She dropped out of school in her teens to become San Francisco’s first African American female cable car conductor. Maya attended Mission High School and won a scholarship to study dance and drama at San Francisco’s Labor School, where she was exposed to the progressive ideals that animated her later political activism. Maya began to speak again at 13, when she and her brother rejoined their mother in San Francisco. 1969: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is an autobiography describing the young and early years of Maya Angelou. She fell silent and did not speak for five years. When she later heard the news that an uncle had killed her attacker, she felt that her words had killed the man. Too ashamed to tell any of the adults in her life, she confided in her brother. Unable to pronounce her name because of a stutter, Bailey called her “My” for “My sister.” A few years later, when he read a book about the Maya Indians, he began to call her “Maya,” and the name stuck.Īt age seven, while visiting her mother in Chicago, she was sexually molested by her mother’s boyfriend. She enjoyed a close relationship with her brother. She credits her grandmother and her extended family with instilling in her the values that informed her later life and career. In Stamps, the young girl experienced the racial discrimination that was the legally enforced way of life in the American South, but she also absorbed the deep religious faith and old-fashioned courtesy of traditional African American life.

Her parents divorced when she was only three and she essencewas sent with her brother Bailey to live with their grandmother in the small town of Stamps, Arkansas. Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Maya Angelou in San Francisco, at the time of the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1970.

Friends quotes maya angelou