Rita Coburn Whack talking:
So, you have a person that’s born in 1928 in Stamps, Arkansas. By 1935, she goes to St. Louis, so she’s actually part of the Great Migration. By the time she goes to San Francisco in her teens and then leaves there and goes into—in the 1960s into New York. she’s being handed off between her grandmother, her mother.
She’s being handed off. I think the overarching thing that’s happened in her life is that she’s experienced a lot of rejection, she’s experienced abandonment, she’s experienced not being accepted, from that racism to even inside her home. And so, when we start the film with one of her quotes—”You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated”—it sums up how she lived her life.
She was raped as a child by her mother’s boyfriend. at seven years old. She didn’t speak for the next five years. But she also says, when she decided to speak, she had a lot to say. But during those five years, she read. And that is one of the equalizers. And also, go back to the South, at a time when people carried themselves, blacks, with a certain comportment. They may have—there may have been poor people around, but for her, her family was not poor. Her grandmother owned a store and owned land. And so, she was educated from the moment she got there. So, in that five years, she’s reading Balzac, Guy de Maupassant. She’s reading the kind of work that would give her a college education from seven to 13, all of Shakespeare’s works. So she’s a self-educated person in a South that blacks held in esteem about education.
when she goes, she has all of that background in her. It’s ingrained in her. And she also has, from Grandmother Henderson, religion, biblically based, classically taught. And then, from her mother, Vivian Baxter—Vivian Baxter’s family like more like a group of gangsters. I mean, they fought, they gambled. It was a fast life. So she has the street smarts, she has extraordinary intelligence, she has faith. And she ends up taking that and having the strength to go and try new things. So, it’s not like it came from nothing. It came from all of that together.
Bob Hercules talking:
when she went to New York, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild. And she had been writing, and she had run into Langston Hughes and John Killens. And they convinced her to move to New York in the late ’50s and join the Harlem Writers Guild, which was a very important thing for her, because then she was in a community of writers, and they could critique her work, and she could critique their work. And it really, in a way, changed her life and kind of set her on that path to become a writer, though she was still performing at the time.
Colin Johnson talking:
I would say that her as a young woman, I think she had this power and feeling inside of her that she had some work that was unaccomplished, but balancing that with being a mother. And I think that she was torn with the same decision that her mother and her parents actually made, as well, as to stay on a daily basis and be that parent or go off and live your life. She was a teenage mom. 17 years.
I would say that her pride and the way that she was raised allowed her to walk out of a door with a young child in tow and brave the world. And I don’t know that it was a decision that was thought out from the very beginning to have the child. I think it was a series of events that just—as the rest of her life has played out, it’s just like, “I decided to have sex with this man, and a few months later I found out I was pregnant, and now we have to deal with that.” And her mother, my great-grandmother, was an amazingly powerful woman and basically said to her, “When you walk out of this door, don’t let anybody else let you feel like you haven’t been raised. You have been raised. You have all of the tools to go out and conquer the world,” which is an amazing statement to make to a young woman who had really very little formal education, but self-taught and really self-driven internally. So, I think that I just would use different words in the description of it.
Bob Hercules talking:
Before being world-renowned as the poet and writer that she was, she was an actress, she was a calypso singer. Let’s go to 1957.
she was a singer, and she had somewhere along the way picked up calypso singing. She started out as a dancer and then became a singer. And somebody at one point had said to her, “You know, if you could do this calypso act, you could get paid a lot more money, and you could be in some of the better clubs in San Francisco.” And so she took that on and became a calypso singer. She ended up being in this movie, somewhat obscure movie, called Calypso Heat Wave, that came out in 1957. And, you know, her career was kind of launched as a performer. She had been playing in Vegas and doing all kinds of shows. And eventually she went to see a performance of Porgy and Bess in San Francisco. And one thing led to another, and they offered her a job of going on tour with Porgy and Bess, and she went all over the world with Porgy and Bess. It was amazing. ne of our favorite lines. Maya comes out, and Diahann Carroll says—she describes her. And the last thing she says: “No shoes.” And it always strikes me that was a detail that she caught.
think there was this allure, even if you look at the liner notes. In the liner notes, they say that she came from some Caribbean country, because they wanted to just promote her as this dancer at this time. And that was important, and it moved her to another place, she—as she toured with the State Department. And this was huge. Many people had not been out of the country. But to be in a group of African Americans that then tour from—she was in—she was not only in France, where she met James Baldwin for the first time. She toured in Egypt. and all over the Mideast, in places that, you know, in those times, Americans would not have normally gone to. So it was a very interesting experience for her. And she picked up languages and picked up the culture, and it broadened her horizons tremendously.
Rita Coburn Whack talking:
Bayard Rustin had been with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and he was leaving. And he had been—Maya Angelou had become known, because in the early ’60s she had decided—once she heard him speak at Riverside Church, she had decided that they would—she would get together with a group of artists and that they would put on a play to raise money for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. So, she did that, and it was called Cabaret for Freedom. I believe it played at The Village Gate. It was something she did with Godfrey Cambridge.
and a number of actors at that time would get together for Martin Luther King. And one of her lines about that is, when she heard that he was talking about nonviolence, and she herself had suffered so much violence and herself been violated, it was like pouring water on a parched desert. She was ready for it. And so she became the coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership, the Northern coordinator, which was really fundraising. And she was now an executive with that—with that organization and was raising funds. And he also reminded her of her brother, Bailey, who was very instrumental in her life, and so they formed a friendship.
Bob Hercules & Rita Coburn Whack talking:
She also was deeply affected by the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
we found an amazing clip of a protest at the United Nations in New York shortly after Patrice Lumumba was assassinated. And many people suspected it was CIA meddling that led to this assassination. And Maya and other activists at the time went down to the United Nations and held this protest, and they somehow got into the United Nations. And we have this amazing newsreel clip showing that actual event.
Adlai Stevenson was at the desk. He was the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. And Rosa Guy, who was with the writers, Harlem Writers Workshop, her sister at some point screamed, “Murderers!” And when that happened, there ensued a fight and a riot of sorts in the U.N. And when she told us that in Winston-Salem, we looked for the U.N. tapes, and we were able to find that particular tape. And then she goes outside, and there’s the protest in the streets.
So there was a protest—the protest we show is not linked directly to that United Nations protest. But Guy Johnson talks about—it’s a protest about the Freedom Riders who had been down in the South and had been abused, murdered in some cases. And so, Guy Johnson tells this amazing story of a protest that he and his mother were part of. And the police came in on horseback. It was very intimidating, as you can imagine. And so, the crowds parted, and they slowly were getting people away. But Maya Angelou and her son Guy held ground with about five other people.
Guy was a little afraid. he’s saying, “Ma, we’ve got to go.” And Maya held her ground and was not going to move. And then she finally thought of something spontaneously. She took a hairpin and stuck it into one of the horses, the main horse. And the horses—it was mass pandemonium, and it defused the situation to a point— the horse rears up. And the sergeant falls. And then the people come back into the street, and they finish the march.
And I think that one of the things that you see—and Colin and I have talked a lot about this—again, is the fearlessness. And her term there, which comes from Grandmother Henderson, is: “God and I are a majority.” And that’s where she got the no fear from, that we have to do what’s right. And protests were a part of her life for a very long time. We could not document all the protests, but she protested against apartheid. She protested for black men to have rights. She protested, and she would always say, “Don’t complain. Protest, but don’t complain.” And she held that to—to her days. She held that, that you should protest.
When Maya Angelou, in the ’60s—I want to say ’61 or so—went to Egypt, went to Cairo, with Vus Make, her then-husband—and it was a kind of common-law husbandry. They were in Cairo, the relationship ended, and she went to Ghana. When she went to Ghana, Ghana was exciting. W. E. B. Du Bois was there. There’s a woman in the film, Alice Windom, who’s a sociologist now but was her roommate in Ghana. And they got together, and they found out that Malcolm X was coming. And Malcolm X wanted to get an African country to bring a charge of genocide against the United States. And all of the people from America who were there, the blacks from America, got together and supported him and talked with him and protested and went into the United Nations and went into the embassies to discuss this. And so, it was during that time that they met and talked about the ideologies that he had and became close. And they really became close. And Guy Johnson also had some time with Malcolm X. And so, for that amount of time, they spent that together. And she was, as you say, coming back to the United States to work with him.
I believe she had a conversation when she came back to the United States from the airport. And then, by the time they were to get together, to actually get together, he had been assassinated. And someone told her to stay in her apartment. Had she seen the news? She said no. And they came over to deliver that information to her, because they knew that it would be devastating. And so, she never got to work with him when she came back to the United States.
Dr. King was assassinated on her birthday. She was going to go back to work for Dr. King. He had—she had run into him at some kind of a rally or something, and he came up to her afterwards and said, “I want you to come back to work for me. I’ve got an important position for you,” basically going around the country for Operation Breadbasket, or—it was the poor people’s movement he was starting up. And so she agreed to do that, but she said, “I just need a little bit of time. I’m going to celebrate my birthday. I’m going to reconnect with some people.” And then April 4th happened, and he was assassinated just before she was going to go back to work for him. And it was absolutely devastating. She briefly went mute again. It just devastated her. But it did lead to something very positive.
James Baldwin came over. James Baldwin was her mentor and best friend. Slamming on the door, saying, “You’ve got to”. “Open this door right now,” because she wasn’t coming out.
She had been home for about four or five days, and admittedly unkempt and not speaking. And he came, and he said, you know, some choice words about opening the door. And she let him in. And he said, “Shower, get ready, I’m going to take you out of here.” And when he did that, he took her to the home of the—Jules Feiffer was there. I believe Philip Roth was in this group. And they were all talking, and she began to tell stories of her childhood. And it was there that those stories were heard. And Judy Feiffer, Jules’ then-wife, called Bob Loomis at Random House and said, “You ought to hear the stories that this woman has.”
And I think one of my favorite stories, when she started talking, she said there was such racism in Stamps, Arkansas, that black people couldn’t eat vanilla ice cream. And so, everybody laughs, and then she begins to tell these stories. And they’re stories that she lived. And we’ve often heard this—so much has happened to her. And I feel like, well, welcome to world of blacks born in 1928 Jim Crow South and so on.
But she has done an—she did an amazing job of not only living through that history, documenting that history, participating in that history, and then it being so well documented. So one of the things that you have in this documentary is you have history from a black woman’s perspective, which is—you know, beyond Phillis Wheatley, it’s not what’s written down. We don’t have that. And so, this whole trajectory of which her life path was on was something that we had to dig and to follow and to try to embrace.
she writes I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. It comes out in ’69. She didn’t originally want to write it. And as Bob Loomis points out, today everybody writes a book. But back at that time, people that were relatively unknown didn’t write books about their lives. And so, she had to be convinced. And as Bob says, when she found out that it would be difficult, that’s when she thought, “Hmm, maybe I can do this.”
I think over time she was surprised. But also remember that when this book was first done, she talked about sexual abuse. We talk about that now, seriously, but more casually. When she talked about it, it was a taboo. People didn’t tell that something like this happened. So that book came out in 1969, and it was banned in many schools. And now it’s a course adoption in colleges and high schools all over the country. But given the time period, 1969, that was not the case.
she talked about rape and sexual abuse in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, followed by—that took her to 16 and being pregnant. And Gather Together in My Name, the second one, takes you from 17 to 19, in which prostitution occurs. And we felt it was very important to put that into the film, because she wanted to make sure that people, as she said, could gather together in her name and not have this idea that they’d never done anything wrong, that she may have expected that she would be ostracized, but she talked to her family about it, talked to Guy about it, and said, “I’ve got to tell this, because I lived it.”
I think her point was that others would learn from this, and others could hear her voice and read these books and learn from that and be able to go on with their lives and not be stigmatized by some of the things that happened. So it was a powerful lesson.
Colin Johnson talking:
if you ask me, the philosophy—right?—and it kind of goes down, and she has an amazing way to kind of boil situations down—but is: “I am human. Nothing human can be foreign to me.” And so, as she received what other people’s actions were, she also gave of her own life and understood that people were going to be able to resonate, and it would be attainable to people, because they come from the same place, which is humankind.
Bob Hercules & Rita Coburn Whack talking:
We had a wealth of archival material. One of my favorite scenes that illustrates what you were talking about is she’s talking about Porgy and Bess, and Alexander Smallens, the director of the show, said he wanted her to sing an aria, but she didn’t know an aria. So he said, “Well, surely, you must know a gospel, some kind of a, you know, something from the church.” And so she performs it. And the rest of the cast is actually jealous, because it’s such an amazing performance. And we cut back and forth of her singing it from a 1982 clip that Bill Moyers had done at Stamps, Arkansas, back in a church that she had attended, or she was there in 1982. And then we cut from her singing this piece to our present-day interview, and she is right in key. It’s an amazing moment for me, that she can, at this age, come right back to that. And so, you’re right. We were able to constantly go back and forth between the archival pieces we had to the present day. We were lucky enough to interview her about three times, three different settings, before she passed. So we had a lot of material to work with.
And it was a large body of work. And I remember when I first asked her would she do a documentary, she gave me a look of “Do you know what you’re asking?” And I didn’t quite know. But once she agreed to it, she was very helpful. And I remember, once, she called us up, and she said, “How’s it coming? You know I’m not getting any younger.” And so, she was very aware. But we also had to be aware that we were taking her back. She had done the books, and she could now just live her life. And we were asking her to come back and relive it again for us. And she did that, to the extent that she relived every scene. And I think it was cathartic for her. I really think it was good for her.
she would often quote James Baldwin: We’re in “these yet to be United States.” And that’s still a fact: We’re in these yet to be United States. Racism is alive and well. We must not be defeated by it, but we must protest, and we must be a part of getting rid of it to the extent that we can. And so, I think that she would be happy with the fact that we pulled this together in her honor, but we’re still saying the same things: You must not be defeated by this, but you must fight it.
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Rita Coburn Whack
co-director and producer of Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise. She was producer of The Dr. Maya Angelou Show on Oprah Radio, Maya Angelou Black History Month specials, and manager of Maya Angelou’s Facebook site of 4.5 million fans.
Bob Hercules
co-director and producer of Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise. He directed two recent films for American Masters: Bill T. Jones: A Good Man and Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance.
Colin Johnson
grandson of Maya Angelou. He is the co-founder and principal of Caged Bird Legacy, LLC, which is dedicated to continuing the life work of Maya Angelou.
— source democracynow.org