Maya Angelou, Lyrical Witness of the Jim Crow South, Dies at 86

Maya Angelou died on Wednesday, May 28, at the age of 86. Margalit Fox remembers her in an obituary for The New York Times. Born in St. Louis as Marguerite Ann Johnson, Angelou worked a series of odd jobs and displayed a range of talents, from acting to activism, but became best known for the force and political consequence of her writing. Angelou read her own poem at Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration and was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. Fox writes, “As a whole, her work offered a cleareyed examination of the ways in which the socially marginalizing forces of racism and sexism played out at the level of the individual.”

Read at The New York Times

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