AUDIO
Revered poet and author, Maya Angelou, died this morning at her home in North Carolina. We spend our first hour honoring her memory. We're joined by Clarence Waldron, founder of CW Media and former senior writer/editor of Jet Magazine, writer Rita Coburn Whack, and writer Haki Madhubuti.
Angelou was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1928. She grew up in Stamps, Arkansas. She gave birth to her son Guy Johnson as a teen and then started a career in the arts while holding down a job as the first African-American cable car conductor in San Francisco. As documented in “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” in 1969 and the remaining five volumes of her memoirs, she was also a dancer, a calypso singer and a civil rights activist, among other interests. Angelou wrote hundreds of poems, most notably “Phenomenal Woman,” “And Still I Rise,” “To A Man” and “On the Pulse of Morning" which was written for President Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration ceremony.
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