Maya Angelou
Silent for five years as a child, she became one of the great voices of American literature
Marguerite Johnson was sent at three to live with her grandmother in segregated Arkansas, where the family ran the only Black-owned store in town. At seven, on a visit to her mother in St Louis, she was raped by her mother's boyfriend. He was found dead days after she testified against him, and she concluded that her voice had killed him. She stopped speaking to anyone but her brother for nearly five years.
In that silence she read everything she could find and memorised poetry. A teacher, Mrs Flowers, coaxed her back into speech by insisting that poetry had to be spoken aloud to be fully understood. By 16 she was San Francisco's first Black female streetcar conductor, and a single mother.
She was, at different points, a dancer touring Europe in Porgy and Bess, a calypso singer, a journalist in Egypt and Ghana, and an organiser for Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King was assassinated on her 40th birthday. Her friend James Baldwin persuaded her to write her life story, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1969, became one of the first widely read memoirs by a Black American woman.
She wrote six more volumes of autobiography, essays and poetry, and read her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 and taught at Wake Forest University for over 30 years.