Maya Angelou (4)

US President Barack Obama presenting Angelou with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2011 (Wikipedia)

In 1961 Maya Angelou met South African freedom fighter Vusumzi Make; and she and her son Guy moved with him to Cairo, where she became the editor of “The Arab Observer”.
When her relationship with Make ended, she went with her son to Accra, where she worked as an editor and a freelance writer, and taught at the University of Ghana’s School of Music and Drama. She was active in the African-American expatriate community and became close with human rights activist and black nationalist leader Malcolm X.

On her return to the U.S., in 1964, she helped Malcolm X build a new civil rights organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, which disbanded after his assassination the following year. Devastated and adrift, she joined her brother in Hawaii, where she resumed her singing career, but soon she…