Given how ubiquitous memoirs are today people actually get master’s degrees in memoir writing. It’s a little hard to fathom that just 50 years ago an autobiography by a living African-American woman was rare verging on nonexistent. But that changed in 1969. That’s when Maya Angelou at age 40, kind of a late bloomer as an author published her first book "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." It was the first of seven autobiographies she published and it became the first nonfiction book ever by a black woman to become a bestseller.

"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" is a coming of age story about the racism and sexual abuse and other outrages Angel encountered growing up. It’s a claimed beloved and also regularly subject to bans by school libraries. For the latest installment of our American Icon series producer Sonia Green looks at how Angelou’s first book came to be and became so important to so many people. A listener note. This story contains a racial slur that is part of the book.

Thanks to the book that launched her writing career. I know why the caged bird sings. Maya Angelou is remembered as a writer of the highest order but she lived nearly half her life before she wrote that book and had done just about everything to pay the bills. Here’s the abbreviated version:

At age 16 she was pregnant with her only son Clyde Guy Johnson. To support him she took on many jobs. She lied about her age to get a job as San Francisco’s first black female streetcar conductor. Later she worked as a prostitute and ran a brothel. Then in the 1950s she’s singing at a club in San Francisco when she meets some cast members in the award winning opera by Gershwin "Porgy and Bess." They ask if she can dance. She says yes. She’s offered a role and goes on a twenty two nation tour around the world with the company. Back in the states in 1957 she records her album Miss Calypso:

And these Yankee girls give me a big scare black man behind the iron bars. The base is named Paradise where both girls and Calypso girls go to work to see what they got.

She also ends up writing for television, is a journalist, a playwright, and a poet. She becomes friends with writers like Rosa guy and James Baldwin.

She attends a speech of Dr. Martin Luther King Junior’s in Harlem.

Organize politically and spiritually around the concept of the equality of man.

She ends up befriending Dr. King and then on her fortieth birthday:

Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis Tennessee. Police rushed the 39 year old Negro leader to a hospital where he died of a bullet wound in the neck.

She is devastated

Just this month.

That’s Angela from the 2016 documentary and "still I rise." Her grief makes her relapse into a condition from her childhood volunteering Mutism:

And I fell into mutism again. This couldn’t be messier

Then a friend, Baldwin. steps in.

And finally after about five days James Baldwin came to my. Family I’m a madman and open this door. I’ll call the police. So open the door. And he came and he saw I was really unkempt. My house was a mess and I always left a pretty house. He said, "" Go take a shower put some clothes and I’m taking you somewhere.

He took her to a dinner party at the home of cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his then wife Judy.

And Baldwin asked me tell me a little bit about your grandma. Tell a little bit about Stamps, Arkansas. So I started by saying, "In Arkansas racism was so prevalent that black people couldn’t eat any vanilla ice cream. And so it made everybody laugh and they asked me to tell his story until another.

The next day Judy Fifer calls her friend an editor at Random House Robert Loomis and she tells Loomis that Angelo is a gripping storyteller. Many years later in a 1986 interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air Angela recalls that conversation she had with Loomis.

He phoned me a number of times and I said No Robert Loomis. I said No I’m not. I’m not interested until he said to me. Well Miss Angelou I guess it’s just as well that you don’t attempt this book because to write autobiography as literature is almost impossible. So I said so in that case I’d better try.a

And try she did. In Winston-Salem North Carolina where she lived she would rent a room at the books town in a hotel her only niece an archivist Rosa Johnson take me there.

We are at the historic Brooks town. It’s a hotel here was the Salem where Dr. Angelo would come to do her writings and here we are.

Johnson says her onward rent for a room for the entire time she was writing.

She was an early riser so she’d probably be down here like 6:00 in the morning maybe till afternoon and come home and have lunch. She had a ritual she check in here. She would have the staff take any paintings or drawings off the walls because she would have her stories, her Bible , a bottle of Sherry and a yellow pad.

So with her Bible, her thesaurus, her bottle of sherry, and yellow pad Angelou found her mind settling on her earliest memories.

When I was three and Bailey four we had arrived in the musty little town wearing tags on our wrists which instructed to whom it may concern that we were Maggie Reed and Bailey Johnson Junior from Long Beach California en route to Stamps, Arkansas in care of Mrs. Annie Henderson

And this is where life begins for Maya Angelou:

Born Marguerite Johnson for the first several years of her life she along with her brother Bailey are raised by her grandmother. That’s Mrs. Annie Henderson and Uncle Willie. Mrs. Henderson owns the only store in the black section of town .Joanne Gavin runs the serious flower Poetry Center at James Madison University. She also teaches Angela’s work in her English class.

And so when she takes us to Stamps, Arkansas we can see the fear that Uncle Willie has to go through has to hide in a vegetable bin to avoid the Ku Klux Klan

From this side of the store Bailey and I heard him say to Mama Annie tell Willie he better lay low tonight. And crazy nigga messed with a white lady today. Some of the boys will be coming over here later. Even after this slow drag of years I remember this sense of fear which filled my mouth with hot dry air and made my body light.

She knew early on that because of racism black people were hated.

She briefly leaves her life in Stamps when her father shows up and takes her in Bailey to live with their mother in St. Louis. Marguerite was almost eight years old and it is here that she is raped by her mother’s boyfriend. The man is arrested put on trial and found guilty. The day after the trial he was killed possibly by her uncles. This is the first time Angela goes meet

Just my brain carrying my words out might poison people and they’d curl up and die like the black, fat slurs they’d only pretended I had to stop talking.

After five years of not speaking reading is what eventually helped the writers speak again. Among the authors she read was Paul Laurence Dunbar. His poem sympathy would inspire the title for "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" that she would write decades later.

I would like to read the Dunbar poem if I may.

Professor Emeritus from the College of William and Mary Joanne Braxton:

I know what the caged bird feels of us when the sun is bright on the upland slopes.

Braxton wrote about Angela’s autobiography in black women writing autobiography a tradition within a tradition.

She identified with that caged bird. With this tremendous impulse to fly to be free of that cage. And while there were many ways in which she could not escape the immediate oppressions of her environment she could test them through imaginary flights of literature.

And when why the caged bird scenes were released in 1969, prior to 1970 sexism played a role in who was allowed to tell the story of being black in America. Selwyn Kidjo professor of Africana studies at Wellesley College:

If you look at an image backwards beat Frederick Douglass big Washington woman voices are silent so you don’t hear the word they were just their wives or their help mates. But they’re never painted or printed or published or articulated.

Furious power executive director Joanne Gavin:

There were very few autobiographical pieces that I knew of by black women. And so Maya Angelou’s was among the first.

The power of Angela’s story is that she is a black woman.

But the early black women tradition really comes into being in the 1970s. Now significantly enough in 1970 a number of works come out that Torah gave us a sense of women voices. For example you have Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye by 1970. You have Maya Angelou "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings." We have Lewis Mary what is in terms of daddy was a numbers runner in 1970. You have Alice Walker the third life of Grange Cooper on and of course it ended of course in that very same year of admission. Wallace is very powerful work black macho and the myth of the civil.

Angeles book demonstrates all the forces of black women still grapple with and what some call intersectionality today. Kimberly Crenshaw formed the theory to describe how our overlapping social identities relate to structures of racism and oppression.

She’s already talking about intersectionality. We just didn’t have the terminology that Kimberly Crenshaw most brilliantly brought forth after the fact but she had illustrated intersectionality without calling it that. She called it a tripartite crossfire.

The black female is assaulted in her tender years. All those common forces of nature at the same time that she is common in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice quite illogical hate and black lack of power.

Which if you think about it is a little bit more charged than intersectionality which sounds more neutral by comparison.

You cannot talk about Angela without talking about her influence or relationship to other black women writers.

You could not have a color purple without a caged bird sings. It opens up a space.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker came in 1982, 13 years after "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." Angelou's book shows her struggles with race and class. As a teenager she works as a maid alongside Miss Glory. Their employer Mrs. Cullen in one day decides to count Angela who is Margaret to her Mary because a friend said her name was too long. Marguerite was furious. Reverend Serena’s turn the senior pastor at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina Angela was a member for decades.

If you visited that Angelou home surely she had you know the home staff. But she treated them with the utmost respect and his gratitude to. When she would introduce him. This is Mr. so and so this is Miss so Mrs. so and so it wasn’t you know Janie. No no.

She would insist that whoever came close her door and respect everybody in that house. Yes is my housekeeper. But that’s Miss Thomas not married to you. And I’ve seen times when she had people to leave because they didn’t give the due respect to the women.

Angelou did not take matters in respect lightly. Not long ago a tweet resurfaced a 90s video of a teenage girl addressing the author.

I wanted to ask my her views on interracial relationships.

Oh thank you. And first I miss Angelou Miss Jasmine. I’m not Maya. I’m 62 years old. I have lived so long and tried so hard that a young woman like you or any other has no you have no license to come up to me and call me by my first name. For some the debate was not about what she said.

Rather I am never here for any black person scolding another black person around white folks. I am never here for them.

That’s from King of Reid on YouTube.

I am tired of respectability politics. I am tired of this notion that just because someone has started class I have to address them as because

For others it was more a matter of respect something Braxton says Angelou tried to achieve through her writing.

So in the tradition of these slave for mothers and the women missionaries and ministers who wrote autobiographies before her she is negotiating for respect. Not merely for herself for herself yes but also for others like her that they might be recognized both as fully human and also as representing a spark of the divine.

You also cannot talk about Angelou in only literary terms

If you just see that the great actress that she was the great dancer that she was a great musician that she was you miss her. If you don’t realize that this is a woman of tremendous faith and tremendous dependence on God.

I visited Reverend Churn in his office one Sunday after his church service.

She came to see me one day. Well it was summer. We had our summer camp and I knew her car had arrived. And she never showed. I finally went downstairs found her surrounded by kids rapping you know Dr. Angelo could you know people tried that. Dr. Angelo could rap. She had those kids and throw.

the albums she recorded way back before her writing career in 1957 is one of the many reasons Angeou is sometimes dubbed the godmother of hip hop.

She was speaking the Times. The struggle to beat on Miss Calypso in 1957 just drums and her voice on beat. I don’t know anyone who came before her at least within the recorded era of music.

That is music producer Shawn Rivera.

I’m sure that our ancestors kept history by putting words in stories to music because we couldn’t write it down. But as far as what we know is hip hop today Maya Angelou was the pioneer.

Rivera discovered Angelou back in 2007. It was life changing and inspired caged bird songs an album he worked with Angelou for seven years. It was released in November 2014 six months after her death. The songs are from her poems some of which are based on experiences from the book.

She talks about you know there’s a long dead girl in San Francisco by the Golden Gate. She said she’d give me all I wanted but I just couldn’t wait. Right. And it made me laugh because for someone who seemed to be so presidential and prim and proper I didn’t realize how she came from the same kind of streets I was raised in and then some before they were what they are. She became this I could connect with her through the book in a way that the poetry only alluded to.

There’s a army here in San Francisco that pity me on a level that I just couldn’t believe that it’s picking me up and picking them up and getting to them. And begin taking them.

The album has a cult like violence.

People are still discovering it and that’s one of those things when you when you’re as timeless as Dr. Angelou. There’s no rush. When I found her book almost 40 years after it was written and it still changed the trajectory of my life to this day. So 40 years from now you know my great grandkids will be just as inspired by it.

You’ve heard of being Book Week. It started with one book "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings."

There was a challenge to her book in 1982 that came to the attention of a small group of publishers, booksellers, and librarians that were working on a display for what turned into a book card today.

Deborah Caldwell-Stone is the interim director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association.

It was the idea that her book was being banned. Annette you know a nominee from multiple awards an actual award winning book or a great work of literature is being removed from the schools based on the objections to the use of language and sexual situations that were challenging but relevant and important to the book. That really spurred these individuals to bring a focus to book censorship.

In 1990 years after the office was inspired to work on ban books they started keeping a yearly list of the top books banned and "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" has made the list hundreds of times.

What cited most often in the listed challenges is profanity, explicit sexual activity, or the description of explicit sexual activity, and sometimes very vague references to the book not representing quote traditional values unquote.

Deborah Caldwell-Stone says there are always be challenges to I know why the caged bird sings because it itself is a challenge to the status quo.

It forces individuals to confront their preconceptions of culture, of race, of class, and people find that profoundly disorienting and uncomfortable and I think as long as literature does that and in fact isn’t that the task of literature to challenge us to cause us to question ourselves and our beliefs.

Joanne Gavin: Maya Angelou was right on target when she said this has to be not only recognized but young people have to read about this. Not only did she give us that scene in terms of the rape but she also talked about the very hard issues of racism of racial violence. And so she tells us these stories that are sometimes hard to hear but must be heard.

Earlier in her life Angelou struggled to find her voice sometimes literally when she did not speak in finding it and writing about it. She helped others find theirs.

This book was the closest thing for me to feeling understood by someone who had walked a path and emerged successfully from a childhood of abuse.

I identified with her as a young black girl the young black girl who is still alive and inside me who experienced terrible things that I don’t want to talk about she became a champion for me for me too.

During my interview with Braxton she asked me why I wanted to produce this story in particular.

I did not encounter it until college and it changed. It changed my it changed my life in ways that. I didn’t I didn’t even know how to articulate. So yeah I get emotional good.

Talking to Braxton tipped me back to reading the book as a college student in the 90s. I saw myself for the first time in the words. My story of rape at a young age racism and identity was not unique but it was also not normal and I felt validation .

Angelo’s niece: There’s family dynamics that we as a people don’t often talk about like mental health issues, incest, rape that goes on in family. And so by Aunty writing about those things it opened the door for us to realize and acknowledge pain.

This is perhaps the greatest lasting impact of the book.

Joanne Braxton: I think it’s critically important to recognize that her text offers itself as a counter narrative to the American historical narrative that remains his story. By bringing her black and female voice forward to say in the words of Langston Hughes I too sing America.

The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance. The best it ever done. That’s my title and whining. I man them to bad.

Maya Angelou died in 2014. She was 86. Sonia green produced our story. She is based in Macon Georgia where she is a reporter at Mercer University’s Center for collaborative journalism. Pedro Rafael Rosato was the engineer. All the studio 360 American icons are made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. And you can find dozens more of our American icons stories like that and hour long documentaries at Studio 360.