![]() RITA COBURN WHACK: Well, when she goes, she has all of that background in her. So she’s a self-educated person in a South that blacks held in esteem about education.ĪMY GOODMAN: And how does she transfer that into-as she moves into adulthood, where does she head? You talk about her going to New York. She’s reading the kind of work that would give her a college education from seven to 13, all of Shakespeare’s works. So, in that five years, she’s reading Balzac, Guy de Maupassant. And so, she was educated from the moment she got there. Her grandmother owned a store and owned land. They may have-there may have been poor people around, but for her, her family was not poor. And also, go back to the South, at a time when people carried themselves, blacks, with a certain comportment. But she also says, when she decided to speak, she had a lot to say. RITA COBURN WHACK: She didn’t speak for the next five years. She didn’t speak for the next five years? 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.ĪMY GOODMAN: She was raped as a child by her mother’s boyfriend.ĪMY GOODMAN: She-at seven years old. ![]() 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. RITA COBURN WHACK: She’s being handed off. By the time she goes to San Francisco in her teens and then leaves there and goes into-in the 1960s into New York-ĪMY GOODMAN: But for a second, she’s being handed off between her grandmother, her mother. Louis, so she’s actually part of the Great Migration. RITA COBURN WHACK: So, you have a person that’s born in 1928 in Stamps, Arkansas. I began by asking Rita for a thumbnail sketch of Maya Angelou’s life. Last month, during the Sundance Film Festival, I sat down with the co-producers and directors of the film, Rita Coburn Whack and Bob Hercules, as well as Maya Angelou’s grandson, Colin Johnson. The new film, Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise, offers insight into the iconic writer’s public and personal life through rare archival footage and in-depth interviews with Angelou and her friends, from rapper Common to Oprah to former President Bill Clinton. I am the hope and the dream of the slave.ĪMY GOODMAN: Maya Angelou, reading from her poem “Still I Rise.” Surprisingly, Angelou has never been the subject of a feature-length documentary, until now. Just ’cause I laugh as if I have gold minesīringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, Just ’cause I walk as if I have oil wells MAYA ANGELOU: You may write me down in history The new documentary, Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise, takes its title from one of Maya Angelou’s most beloved works. Five years ago this week, President Obama bestowed upon her the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The book launched the phenomenal career for which she is known around the world as an award-winning author and people’s poet. After King’s assassination, with encouragement by the author James Baldwin, Angelou penned I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, her first of seven autobiographies. She went on to become an accomplished singer and actress, then worked with Martin Luther King Jr. She was raped and refused to speak for five years. Now, for the first time, a documentary chronicles her remarkable life, beginning with her traumatic childhood. Portland Public Library - Book of the Week: And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems by Maya Angelou* “Just like moons and like suns / With the certainty of tides, / Just like hopes springing high, / Still I’ll rise.” Maya Angelou -American writer, singer, actor, and civil rights activist-lifts up her arms by the sea, face shining, in a photograph on the library’s bright first edition of “And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems.” Her third book of verse, published in 1978, includes some of her most beloved and evocative work: “Phenomenal Woman,” “Woman Work,” “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me,” and “Still I Rise.AMY GOODMAN: Today, a Black History Month special, as we remember the life and legacy of the legendary poet, playwright, civil rights activist, Maya Angelou.
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