Maya Angelou: Going from Strength to Strength

Making

WBEZ Chicago

Society & Culture

4.6 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2024

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In just 86 years Maya Angelou lived dozens of lives. Perhaps best known for her seminal autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou is one of the most celebrated literary minds in history, whose poetry and prose has touched generations of readers. But before Caged Bird, Angelou danced and sang on and off Broadway, earned the moniker “Miss Calypso” in the 1950s, called dozens of American cities and African nations home, and even became the first Black woman to work as a cable car conductor in San Francisco. On this episode of Making, host Brandon Pope sits down with Rita Coburn, co-director of the Peabody-Award-winning PBS documentary Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise; Randal Jelks, professor of African and African American studies and American studies at the University of Kansas; and Dr. Maxine Mimms, the founder of the Tacoma Campus of Evergreen State College and a longtime friend of Angelou. “Her main word was courage,” Dr. Mimms said, “The courage to love, the courage to walk, the courage to move.” Making tells the story of a different, iconic figure every episode. Subscribe now.

Transcript

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0:00.0	A warning before we begin this week's episode contains a discussion about childhood sexual violence
0:08.3	You may write me down in history with your bitter twisted life. You may tribe me in the very dirt, but still
0:16.9	like dust, Al Rrath.
0:22.4	She's one of the most influential voices of our time.
0:25.0	Human beings are more alike than we are unalized.
0:30.0	It's a voice that's spoken to millions.
0:32.0	An activist and thinker. People are afraid to be
0:35.5	pried loose from their ignorance because they know their ignorance so well they know
0:40.8	it better than they know their body odors.
0:43.0	And a prolific writer, performer, and poet.
0:47.0	When you want truth, the same way you wanted that breath of air. You've already got it.
0:56.0	From W. B. E. Z. Chicago. This is Making Maya Angelo. I'm Brandon Pope. Today, Maya Angelo is one of the most famous and celebrated
1:06.2	minds of the 20th century. Her seminal autobiography, I know why the Cage Bird sings, is one of the most lauded American literary works of all time.
1:16.0	Yet she's a woman who defies category.
1:19.0	It's in the reach of my arms, the span of my hips, the stride of my step, the curl of my lips, I'm a woman.
1:27.0	And now my day.
1:30.4	Joining us is Rita Coburn, who directed and produced the Peabody Award Winning
1:34.9	documentary about Maya Angelo and Still I Rise.
1:38.7	Maya Angelo speaks to us even now.
1:43.0	Dr. Randall Jelks, professor of African and African American studies at the University of Kansas.
1:49.0	It's about the resiliency.
1:51.0	She asks all of us to be resiliant. She asks all of us to be resilient. And a legend in her own right, Dr. Maxine
	...

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