Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Ann Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4, 1928. In 1931, when she was three years old, her parents divorced and she and her 4-year old brother, Bailey, were sent alone, by train, to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. While living with her grandmother, Angelou participated in a wide variety of dance classes including tap, jazz, foxtrot, and salsa. After four years in Stamps, the children returned to their mother's care. At age eight, Angelou confessed that her mother's boyfriend had sexually abused her, and Angelou's uncles beat the man to death. Horrified by the outcome, she became mute, believing, as she has stated, that "the power of [her] words led to someone's death." She remained nearly mute for another five years, at which point her mother sent the children to live with their grandmother once again. Angelou credits a close friend in Stamps, Mrs. Flowers, for helping her "refind her voice". She began to speak again at age 13. During one of her first bouts of activism, Angelou persisted at age 15 in becoming the first black person hired on the San Francisco streetcars.

In 1940, while spending the summer with her father in the Los Angeles area, Angelou was assaulted by her father's live-in girlfriend, which led to her running away from home and spending a month as a resident of a junk yard that housed other homeless children. She finally called her mother and was sent a ticket back home to San Francisco, but her month of homelessness had a profound effect on her way of looking