The lessons of a colourful life

THE 86 years of Maya Angelou’s life, from 1928 to May 28, 2014, saw enormous changes for black Americans. She worked with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and read one of her poems at the US presidential inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993. She lived to see a black American president, Barack Obama, who describes her on the dust jacket of Rainbow in the Cloud, a collection of her writings, as “a phenomenal woman”.

Sales of Angelou’s works, which include I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), peaked at 400,000 copies a year. Her autobiography recounts how she was raped, aged eight, by her mother’s boyfriend, who was tried and found guilty, but released after one day in jail. Four days later, he was murdered, probably by Angelou’s uncles. She remained mute for five years, convinced that her voice had caused his death.