She lived in Africa for three years, editing an English-language magazine in Cairo - she speaks six languages - and teaching music and drama in Ghana. She toured Europe and Africa with “Porgy and Bess,” taught modern dance in Rome and Tel Aviv, played the female lead off-Broadway in “The Blacks,” worked with Godfrey Cambridge on “Cabaret for Freedom,” and spent a year helping to raise funds for Martin Luther King in the North. In the early 1950’s she studied dancing with Pearl Primas in New York and later appeared as a singer in San Francisco’s Purple Onion. She was raised in Stamps, Arkansas, by her grandmother and came as a teenager to join her mother in San Francisco, where, by the way, she became the first black fare-collector on the Market Street Railway. Yet all these categories fail to do justice to the scope of her life. Someone has said Maya Angelou’s career has touched more bases than Henry Aaron. Singer, teacher, dancer, poet, authoress, actress, editor, songwriter, playwright. On a recent trip to San Francisco I sought her out at her cottage in Berkeley, across the bay, to share with you the spirit and insights of this gifted and very human woman. But I heard of’ her accomplishments, read her books and continued to nourish the memory of that first encounter. And when finally we met, at another time and far beyond those one immutable boundaries, we hardly stopped talking for hours - two strangers from the same but different place. She moved in the tight and hounded other world of’ the South, whose boundaries black children crossed only in their imagination, if at all, and even then at intolerable risk. I lived in the gentle and neighborly white world that opened generously to ambition and luck. We had grown up in the South, only a hundred miles apart as the Greyhound bus goes, but world beyond worlds in the inner experiences that shape the childhood. BILL MOYERS: A few years ago at a dinner in New York I met Maya Angelou.
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