A visit with Maya
It was cold and spitting snow that day in December 1992 when the cab driver dropped me off at Maya Angelou’s house in Winston-Salem, N.C. I was political editor of this newspaper and was taking a short break from writing and editing stories about Bill Clinton, who had been elected president a month earlier.
The trip, mind you, was related to our Clinton coverage. He had invited the internationally known author, poet and performer to deliver a poem at his January 1993 inauguration, the same role Robert Frost played for John F. Kennedy 32 years earlier. I reached out to Angelou to do a story about her childhood in southwest Arkansas at Stamps, and she responded. She made clear that she preferred to visit with me at her home rather than a restaurant or office.
So even as the Clinton presidential transition continued to make news in Little Rock, I flew to North Carolina. Angelou was generous with her time. I wrote a story that ran on the front page the following Sunday, and I was in the media section on inauguration day in Washington, D.C., as she read the poem “On the Pulse of Morning.”
Angelou later read her poem “A Brave and Startling Truth” at the 50th anniversary of the United Nations and read “From a Black Woman to a Black Man” at the Million Man March in 1995. She was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2000. On Feb. 15, 2011, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama.
Angelou was found dead by her caretaker in May 2014. The following month, Stamps renamed its only park in her honor. In April 2015, the U.S. Postal Service released a stamp in honor of Angelou. The next year saw Congress rename the post office in Winston-Salem after her. Angelou became the first Black woman to appear on a U.S. quarter in January 2022.
“Her first published book, ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ in 1970, was an autobiographical account of her childhood, including the 10 years she lived in Stamps with her grandmother,” Patricia Washington McGraw writes for the Central Arkansas Library System’s Encyclopedia of Arkansas. “The popular and critical success of the book was the foundation of her career as an author and public figure, as well as the basis of her identification as an Arkansas author. She was in the first group of inductees into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 1993. She held more than 50 honorary university degrees, along with many other awards recognizing her accomplishments in the arts and service to human rights.
“Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April, 4, 1928, in St. Louis to Bailey Johnson, who was a naval dietitian, and Vivian Baxter Johnson, who was a nurse. Angelou had one sibling, her older brother Bailey Jr. He called her Maya, his version of ‘my sister.’ After the divorce of their parents in 1931, Marguerite and Bailey Jr. were sent to Arkansas to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, and their uncle in Stamps. Henderson owned a grocery store in the Black section of town and reared the children according to the strict Christian values common in the rural South at that time.
“The family encountered the racial prejudice of white customers in the store and of community leaders generally. In her autobiography, Angelou recounted chafing at the attitudes she encountered as people seemed to condone the limited opportunities available for Black high school graduates. Later, Angelou suggested that her faith and Christian beliefs—as well as her strong sense of fair play and realization of her own and others’ inner beauty—stemmed from these early experiences.”
The children were returned from Stamps to the care of their mother in St. Louis in 1935. They were sent back to Stamps when it was discovered that Angelou had been sexually molested by her mother’s boyfriend. The man was tried and convicted. He was released but later found dead. Angelou, who was 8, believed her voice had caused the rapist’s death. She became mute and remained so for several years.
“The two children once again moved to be with their mother— this time in San Francisco,” McGraw writes. “After dropping out of high school, Angelou was briefly employed as a cable car conductor, the first Black person to hold that position. She returned to Mission High School and earned a scholarship to study dance, drama and music at San Francisco’s Labor School, where she also learned about the progressive ideologies that may have served as a foundation for her later social and political activism.”
She married a Greek sailor named Tosh Angelos when she was 21. They divorced in 1952. She went by the stage name Maya Angelou as she sang at clubs in San Francisco and changed her legal name.
I’m in Stamps as part of my exploration of Lafayette County before the face of this rural area is changed by the coming southwest Arkansas lithium boom. Stamps saw its population fall from 2,859 in 1980 to 1,258 in 2020. The town was once among the most prosperous places in southwest Arkansas. Bodcaw Lumber Co. had major operations here.
According to Steve Teske of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies: “In October 2017, days after Stamps citizens elected Brenda Davis as the town’s first Black mayor, two historical monuments were stolen from Maya Angelou Memorial Park: a placard with Angelou’s name and a bronze bust of three Black men who had served in the Arkansas Legislature following the Civil War.”
In the 2020 census, the population of Stamps was 55 percent Black, 39 percent white and 2 percent Hispanic.