How Black and White America Reacted to Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

By the time I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings hit shelves in the first days of 1970, buzz about the memoir had been building for some time. Newspaper stories about its author, Maya Angelou—a well-known dancer, singer, and political activist—had been teasing the book for years; both Ebony and Harper’s ran excerpts, marking perhaps the first time Harper’s had paid for the work of a Black author. In the days after the book was released, Caged Bird became an instant hit, immediately securing a spot on the New York Times bestseller list. The Book of the Month Club announced it as a special spring 1970 selection. And Angelou became—and would forever remain—an international celebrity.

Throughout the early weeks of 1970, she was inundated with requests for interviews, speeches, and new work. Just how she felt about this instant success is difficult to discern. Angelou told one interviewer, “I was surprised at first. It was really thrilling,” but she told another, “I knew when I was writing it, it would be a success.”

The media couldn’t get enough of Angelou, reveling in the accomplishment of a Black female literary sensation in language that sometimes exoticized her and frequently discussed her appearance. The writer of one article described her as “seductively soft-spoken with full lips that are quick to smile.” Another claimed she had “the grace of an African queen. Wearing an exotic ankle-length costume inspired by the women of Ghana, she is stately and charming.”

Still another called her “perhaps one of the most beautiful women in the world. Her smile is such that when it appears, there is no darkness anywhere about. She has the ability to make an entire room come alive with her warmth.” Ironically, Angelou herself frequently deprecated her looks, once telling a journalist, “My looks don’t fit the current fashion in terms of feminine beauty. I am a woman who is black and lonely.”

The reviews of Caged Bird were widespread and rapturous. Newsweek called the book “more than a tour de force of language or the story of childhood suffering: it quietly and gracefully portrays and pays tribute to the courage, dignity and endurance of the small, rural Southern black community in which she spent most of the early years of the 1930s.” The Courier-Journal & Times in Louisville, Kentucky, called it “a poignant human document that is also an important contribution to American letters.”

The New York Times reviewed Caged Bird together with a memoir by the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. It misstated Angelou’s birth name as “Marguerita Johnson” but called the book “a carefully wrought, simultaneously touching and comic memoir of a black girl’s slow and clumsy growth.” Somewhat remarkably for the time, many reviews were open and explicit about the book’s contents; the review in the Chicago Daily News began, “Maya Angelou was a rape victim at 8.”

Yet many of the reviewers betrayed their own racial politics, seeing in Caged Bird confirmation of what white writers hoped to see from Black literature. The Greensboro News noted of Angelou’s suffering, “Like so many Negro children she was subjected to abuse not only from the white world but also from a disintegrated family structure.” The Toledo Blade wrote approvingly that Caged Bird “is not propaganda nor a history of the blacks nor, most blessedly, sociology.” And San Francisco Magazine added: “Maya Angelou goes beyond Eldridge Cleaver and Malcolm X with whom she might be compared in the sense that her pride in being black is a positive and communicable force rather than inducement for separatism or for hate. Her blackness is secondary to her humanity.”

Angelou herself often framed the book in universalist terms. “I tell it through the black experience, of course, because that’s my experience. But I don’t like it narrowed to just black womanhood or black manhood. I have a Jewish friend who’s lived primarily in New York and Chicago and she says the book took her back to her childhood. That’s the kind of meaning I want the book to have.” She explained in another interview that this universality was the result of the book’s evolution over the course of her writing: “I wrote it because I thought it was important for black girls to know something about what it’s like to grow up. There aren’t many books on the subject for them. Louisa May Alcott is not relevant. Then I got into it and I realized that to tell the truth I had to write for something larger than just the black girl. I accepted that I was writing for middle-aged Chinese women and young Jewish boys with braces on their teeth and, really, for anyone who is or was in a cage.”

At the same time, Angelou refused to sublimate her Blackness, her left politics, or her pride in both. She told one interviewer that she believed her life story had “universal” appeal but that “when I see, it is through the eyes of black women.” She told another interviewer that she’d penned the memoir after realizing “there isn’t enough written for black girls in America that says, listen, you might encounter defeats but must never be defeated.”

Caged Bird remained on the bestseller list for the better part of four months (and it has never gone out of print). Its initial paperback print run was an astounding 350,000 copies. Soon Caged Bird was nominated for the 1970 National Book Award. The fact that it didn’t win, commented one reporter, “bothers its authoress not a whit, but it did inspire something akin to a wildly loyal cult for which she serves as accessible goddess. That she likes.”

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Yet not everyone was pleased with Angelou’s memoir. One Black resident of Stamps, Arkansas, the musician Barbara Wright-Pryor, recalled in an oral history interview that many people in the small town—in which Angelou had spent years of her childhood and about which she had written at great length—were “not very happy” with Angelou after Caged Bird hit shelves. Wright-Pryor claimed that “blacks and whites alike… the entire town was just so angry and dismayed with how they had been portrayed, how their town had been portrayed to the world.”

Wright-Pryor further contended (in, perhaps, a bizarrely blasé manner) that Angelou had exaggerated the violence in Stamps: “As far as any racial conflicts and lynchings and drownings and killing somebody and throwing them in the pond, or Lake June, as it was called, mother said there was no such thing. The only body that she remembers being pulled out of”—Wright-Pryor laughed—“Lake June or the pond there in Stamps, Arkansas, was of a black man who was killed by a black man who caught him with his wife, and everybody knew the story, but in the book, various bodies were pulled out of the pond, it was all fictionalized.” Finally, Wright-Pryor claimed that she had family who had known Angelou in the 1930s and remembered her “very vividly,” and they did not recall her being unable to speak following the sexual assault that formed the narrative core of Angelou’s memoir.

Other residents of Stamps told the press that they barely remembered Angelou. A reporter from the Arkansas Gazette visited the town in the summer of 1970 and found “considerable talk about the book” but few specific comments beyond a vague resentment among some white residents. The town’s state legislator—a well-to-do white woman—told the reporter that Angelou’s “people are well respected in Stamps,” adding, “We have never had any trouble with our colored citizens in Stamps.” By this point, Angelou’s grandmother, whom she called Momma, had died and her aging Uncle Willie was running the family’s general store. The reporter quoted him as saying, “I wouldn’t have put that in if I was her—about the whites being that mean.” Of course, Uncle Willie still had to interact with the town’s white residents on a daily basis. He noted that “Marguerite” had not been back in years.

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Within a matter of months, a standard press narrative had cohered around Angelou. Reporters noted often on how rare it was for a Black woman to achieve such stunning success. A number of articles identified her as “the first black woman to make the best seller lists,” a narrative her publisher aggressively promoted but one that she told the press was “no compliment.” “There are plenty of fine books that deserve that recognition,” Angelou told the interviewer, “from Alice Childress’ ‘Like One of the Family’ to those of Paule Marshall, Rosa Guy, Louise Meriwether and Sarah Wright. None of them were written specifically for the black market. But either their editors don’t believe enough in the black writer’s work or they didn’t know how to promote it right.” Sometimes these reporters’ questions appeared to betray racist biases. In one interview, Angelou was asked if it were professionally advantageous to her to be a Black woman. The interviewer then mentioned the Black incarcerated activist George Jackson and asked, “How many of your black friends have been convicts?”

For her part, Angelou found strength in the lasting relationships—the solidarity—she established with other Black female authors and activists. In 1971, shortly after Toni Morrison’s first novel—The Bluest Eye, another book about a young Black girl surviving sexual violence—was released, Angelou wrote to the author, “‘The Bluest Eye’ is just closed and while your magic is living here around me, I’m obliged to write to you. Your book is so great, your perception so deep and clear and your poetry—oh your poetry. While reading, no, better, being in your book, I was entranced yet conscious, hypnotized yet aware. Now that’s magic.”

Angelou’s letter gestures explicitly at how much she identified with Morrison’s protagonist: “You led me down my own years, gave me back visions which had glanced off my mind, forgotten skipping stones which had sank in a long ago pond.” Many years later, in another letter to Morrison, she wrote, “I love Beloved and I love you for knowing all that about Love, and loss and Life.” Angelou would also send Maxine Waters a beautiful flower arrangement for her birthday, visit Angela Davis in prison, and exchange cordial letters with Alice Walker and Coretta Scott King.

Caged Bird was published at the beginning of what some have called “the ‘renaissance’ of black women writers.” Morrison and Walker, as well as Toni Cade Bambara, Lucille Clifton, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Louise Meriwether, Sonia Sanchez, and many others were beginning to find an audience. Though it rarely merits equivalent critical attention, Angelou’s book marked what the scholar Dolly A. McPherson called “the beginning of a new era in the consciousness of Black men and women.” Another scholar, Sondra O’Neale, argued that the book “bridged the gap between life and art, a step that is essential if Black women are to be deservedly credited with the mammoth and creative feat of noneffacing survival.”

Angelou’s pride in the accomplishments of this new generation of Black women authors was tied to her pride in Blackness and the broader Black community. In the 1970s, she attended the funeral of George Jackson and was deeply moved; she wrote about how meaningful Jackson was for a “young black girl,” a “middle aged black nurse,” and an “old, earth black lady,” closing her article, “Power to the People.” Around the same time, one interviewer noted that Angelou was “preparing to write the script for a television movie based on the life of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer”; she also considered writing a film version of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

At the same time, Angelou had no patience for those who would mythologize Blackness or Black suffering. “I do not wish to be called ‘Momma’ by men old enough to be my fathers,” she wrote in an unpublished essay. “I do not accept willingly the expectation that I will always be kind and cheerful (even Aunt Jemima’s smile is painted on). I am not flattered by the idea that I stay ever ready and lusting for a man’s sexual attention (I get headaches, too). I do not accept the belief that I am so strong that being the most raped, most assaulted and the most burglarized does not destroy me.”

“I am a breathing, hoping, living human being,” she concluded. “I need work, shelter, food, love and respect. I will not willingly accept less.”

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Adapted from There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas: The Rape Trials That Sustained Jim Crow, and the People Who Fought It, from Thurgood Marshall to Maya Angelou by Scott W. Stern, to be published January 28, 2025, by Yale University Press. Copyright © 2025 by Scott W. Stern. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.