Introduction to Maya Angelou: Activist

Maya Angelou was an activist on behalf of the transformational causes of the eras in which she lived, from her birth in 1928 to her death in 2014 at age 86. She chronicled the anticolonial struggle in Africa (as the only woman editor of the Arab Observer newspaper); she knew Nelson Mandela before the South African freedom fighter began his long captivity; in Accra, Ghana she was part of an expatriate community that included W.E.B. Du Bois; she joined Malcolm X in planning for an Organization of Afro-American Unity.

Maya Angelou was a leader in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. Inspired after hearing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speak at a church in Harlem, Angelou organized a historic fund-raising revue for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a “Cabaret for Freedom” at the Village Gate jazz club.  Angelou helped to raise the resources that allowed King and others to organize historic challenges to Jim Crow laws.

Angelou was living in Ghana during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Though living abroad, Angelou and other expatriates rallied the American Embassy in Accra, Ghana, marching for an end to segregation in America and an end to apartheid in South America.

Angelou returned to the United States in the mid-1960s and again found herself in the circle of civil rights activists, calling for economic justice and an end to racism.  In 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. met with Angelou and asked her to tour the country to help promote his “Poor People’s Campaign.” She agreed. Before she embarked on the tour, she learned, on her fortieth birthday, that King had been assassinated. It was a devastating development, though it did not end her activism.  In 1983 she marched with feminist Gloria Steinem.  In 2009 she personally lobbied legislators on behalf of marriage equality—reminding them, “To love someone takes a lot of courage. So how much more is one challenged when the love is of the same sex and the laws say, ‘I forbid you from loving this person’?”

Maya Angelou challenged people to transform their anger into action.  When considering America’s history she said: 

If you’re not angry, you’re either a stone, or you’re too sick to be angry. You should be angry. Now mind you, there’s a difference. You must not be bitter. Now let me show you why. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn’t do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger, yes, you write it, you paint it, you dance it, you march it, you vote it, you do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it.

Article adapted from “Maya Angelou’s Civil Rights Legacy” by John Nichols, May 28, 2014 in The Nation.