The caged bird who helped free the minds of racist America: Poet Maya Angelou is found dead aged 86 after final prophetic tweet

Maya Angelou was found dead by her caretaker Wednesday morning at her home in Winston-Salem North Carolina

She was known as a poet and an author, but also wowed audiences as a dancer, singer, actress and director - appearing on stage, in film and on TV

She worked as a fry cook, a nightclub dancer, a civil rights activist and even a prostitute before she found fame

Her 1970 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings became one of the first best-sellers written by a black woman

Tributes are pouring in from all corners of public life - from politicians like Nancy Pelosi to musicians like Mary J. Blidge and authors like J.K. Rowling

President Barack Obama revealed his own sister was named Maya as a tribute to her



Maya Angelou, the groundbreaking poet and author who inspired millions of Americans with her moving memoirs and works of fiction, is dead at 86.



A caretaker found Angelou dead at her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on Wednesday morning when she arrived to check on the ailing poet.



A hearse with a police escort pulled away from her home about 9am Wednesday after medics and detectives investigated the scene.

Her son Gary B. Johnson, her only child, issued a statement about the author's death: 'Dr. Maya Angelou passed quietly in her home before 8:00 a.m. EST. Her family is extremely grateful that her ascension was not belabored by a loss of acuity or comprehension.



'She lived a life as a teacher, activist, artist and human being. She was a warrior for equality, tolerance and peace. The family is extremely appreciative of the time we had with her and we know that she is looking down upon us with love.'

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Failing health: Angelou maintained a high public profile, despite her deteriorating health. She is seen here on April 5 as her portrait was unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington

Honored: Among the countless accolades Angelou received was the 2010 Medal of Freedom, presented by President Barack Obama in February 2011

Angelou's official portrait will be installed at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington Thursday - one day after her death Inspiring: Even in her failing health, Angelou continued to inspire the people around her. Her final tweet was sent just five days ago

On Thursday - just one day after her death - her official portrait will be installed in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington.



Angelou had been struggling with health problems in recent weeks and had canceled a May 30 appearance at the 2014 MLB Beacon Award Luncheon in Houston, where she was to be honored with the 'Beacon Life Award.'

The civil rights icon blamed her failing health for missing the event.

She remained active, even as her health began to deteriorate. On May 23, five days before her death, she tweeted, 'Listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of God.'

Angelou has been celebrated as one of the greatest writers of her generation, bringing light to the struggles of women and African Americans - as well as the human condition, writ large.

'Human beings are more alike than we are unalike,' she was often quoted as saying.



She was one of the the first African American women to write a best-selling book and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry and a Tony for her acting. She won two Grammys for spoken word albums of her poetry and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2010.



Tributes began pouring from all corners of public life - from authors to politicians and musicians, both young and old.

President Barack Obama issued a statement saying: ' She was a storyteller – and her greatest stories were true. A childhood of suffering and abuse actually drove her to stop speaking – but the voice she found helped generations of Americans find their rainbow amidst the clouds, and inspired the rest of us to be our best selves.'



His own sister, he said, was named Maya as a tribute to the author.



Angelou is seen here at one of her last public appearance April 5. She is flanked by Kim Sajet, Richard Kurin, Cicely Tyson, Oprah Winfrey, Johnnetta Cole, Ross Rossin, Eleanor Holmes Norton and Ambassador Andrew Young

Pals: Angelou was a longtime friend and mentor to Oprah Winfrey - starring alongside her in the historic TV miniseries 'Roots'

National treasure: Maya Angelou, seen here on the set of Sesame Street, became a public-celebrated public intellectual

Former President Bill Clinton also mourned her death: 'With Maya Angelou's passing, America has lost a national treasure; and Hillary and I a beloved friend.'



'Saddened by the news of Maya Angelou's passing. A brilliant woman who contributed so much to the world. Her light will be sorely missed,' wrote Pharrell Williams.



Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling tweeted: "'If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be." Maya Angelou - who was utterly amazing.'

Said New York Mayor Bill De Blasio, whose wife is herself a poet; 'Rest in peace, Dr. Maya Angelou. The world is better because of your voice.'



The singer Rhianna tweeted; 'Angel. #RIPMayaAngelou The first book I read as a teenager, "I know why the caged bird sings". Felt like we knew her.'



Angelou rose from poverty, segregation and violence to become a force on stage, screen and the printed page and one of the most influential writers in American history.



Before she earned fame as a writer, she struggled as a young woman - working as a fry cook, a nightclub dancer, a performer and even a prostitute.

This is the only photo of Only photo of Maya Angelou at school, taken in 1945 at George Washington High School in San Francisco, California. She is pictured back row, right





She gained acclaim for her first book, her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, making her one of the first African-American women to write a best-seller.

In 1998, she directed the film Down in the Delta about a drug-wrecked woman who returns to the home of her ancestors in the Mississippi Delta.

She was the poet chosen to read at President Bill Clinton's first inauguration in 1993. She wrote and read an original composition, 'On the Pulse of Morning,' which became a million-seller.

SAGE ADVICE FROM ONE OF AMERICA'S GREATEST VOICES: UNFORGETTABLE QUOTES OF MAYA ANGELOU 'My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.'

'If you get, give. If you learn, teach.'

'You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.'

'Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud.'

'One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

'Nothing can dim the light which shines from within.

'I believe that each of us comes from the creator trailing wisps of glory.

'When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.'

'Surviving is important. Thriving is elegant.'

'There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.'

'Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.'

Tall and regal, with a deep, majestic voice, Angelou defied all probability and category, becoming one of the first black women to enjoy mainstream success as an author and thriving in virtually every artistic medium. The young single mother who performed at strip clubs to earn a living later wrote and recited the most popular presidential inaugural poem in history.



The childhood victim of rape wrote a million-selling memoir, befriended Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and performed on stages around the world.

An actress, singer and dancer in the 1950s and 1960s, she broke through as an author in 1970 with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which became standard (and occasionally censored) reading, and was the first of a multipart autobiography that continued through the decades.



In 1993, she was a sensation reading her cautiously hopeful "On the Pulse of the Morning" at former President Bill Clinton's first inauguration. Her confident performance openly delighted Clinton and made the poem a best-seller, if not a critical favorite. For former President George W. Bush, she read another poem, 'Amazing Peace,' at the 2005 Christmas tree lighting ceremony at the White House.

She remained close enough to the Clintons that in 2008 she supported Hillary Rodham Clinton's candidacy over the ultimately successful run of the country's first black president, Barack Obama. But a few days before Obama's inauguration, she was clearly overjoyed. She told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette she would be watching it on television 'somewhere between crying and praying and being grateful and laughing when I see faces I know.'

She was a mentor to Oprah Winfrey, whom she befriended when Winfrey was still a local television reporter, and often appeared on her friend's talk show program. She mastered several languages and published not just poetry, but advice books, cookbooks and children's stories.



Political leaders and pop icons alike mourned the death of Angelou, who has been described as a 'national treasure'

Tributes came from all walks of public life - young and old, black and white, actors, musicians and journalists

The music community also issued an outpouring of grief and remembrance for the legendary author

She wrote music, plays and screenplays, received an Emmy nomination for her acting in 'Roots,' and never lost her passion for dance, the art she considered closest to poetry.

'The line of the dancer: If you watch (Mikhail) Baryshnikov and you see that line, that's what the poet tries for. The poet tries for the line, the balance,' she told The Associated Press in 2008, shortly before her birthday.

Her very name as an adult was a reinvention. Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis and raised in Stamps, Arkansas, and San Francisco, moving back and forth between her parents and her grandmother.



She was smart and fresh to the point of danger, packed off by her family to California after sassing a white store clerk in Arkansas. Other times, she didn't speak at all: At age 7, she was raped by her mother's boyfriend and didn't speak for years. She learned by reading, and listening.

'I loved the poetry that was sung in the black church: "Go down Moses, way down in Egypt's land,"'

Angelou, a born performer, worked as a nightclub dancer, an actress, a singer - and even a prostitute before finding fame. She is seen in 1957

she told the AP.



'I just seemed to me the most wonderful way of talking. And "Deep River." Ooh! Even now it can catch me. And then I started reading, really reading, at about 7 1/2, because a woman in my town took me to the library, a black school library. ... And I read every book, even if I didn't understand it.'

At age 9, she was writing poetry. By 17, she was a single mother. In her early 20s, she danced at a strip joint, ran a brothel, was married (to Enistasious Tosh Angelos, her first of three husbands) and then divorced. By her mid-20s, she was performing at the Purple Onion in San Francisco, where she shared billing with another future star, Phyllis Diller.



She spent a few days with Billie Holiday, who was kind enough to sing a lullaby to Angelou's son Guy, surly enough to heckle her off the stage and astute enough to tell her: 'You're going to be famous. But it won't be for singing.'

After renaming herself Maya Angelou for the stage ('Maya' was a childhood nickname), she toured in 'Porgy and Bess' and Jean Genet's 'The Blacks' and danced with Alvin Ailey. She worked as a coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Council, and lived for years in Egypt and Ghana, where she met Malcolm X and remained close to him until his assassination, in 1965.

Three years later, she was helping King organize the Poor People's March in Memphis, Tennessee, where the civil rights leader was slain on Angelou's 40th birthday.

MAYA ANGELOU: A TEEN MOTHER, FRY COOK AND NIGHTCLUB DANCER WHO ROSE FROM NOTHING TO INSPIRE AMERICA Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in April 4, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father was a doorman, her mother a nurse and a card dealer. When her mother and father divorced, her father sent her and her brother to live with their grandmother in rural Arkansas, where she owned a general store.

At the age of eight, she was raped by her mother's boyfriend. When she told her brother what happened, the boyfriend was arrested and jailed for a single day. On his release, he was murdered - likely by Angelou's uncles. Horrified, she took a vow of silence for five years.

At 14, she moved to Oakland, California. At 17, she became pregnant and gave birth to her only child, son Guy Johnson. From there, her life took an even more tumultuous turn, as she took a job at a flophouse, working as a fry cook an even, at times, a prostitute.

She married a white man, a Greek sailor, despite the social condemnation of interracial marriage. She studied dance with some of the greatest choreographers of her day, including Alvin Ailey. She earned a liver as a dancer, performing in nightclubs in New York and San Francisco. Soon after, she was discovered as an actress and singer and performed in the opera ' Porgy and Bess.'

In 1960, she became heavily involved in the civil rights movement in Harlem, New York. Impressed with her performance and organizational skills, Dr Martin Luther King Jr made her northern coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This began a decade of activism that included living in Ghana and becoming close with Malcolm X.

In 1968, at a dinner party, a friend put her in touch with Random House and convinced her to write a book. She shot to national fame with her 1970 autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings - which became a national bestseller, the first for a black female author. She would write five more autobiographies, each praised as gripping, beautiful and devastating.

In the late 1970s, she met a Baltimore TV anchor named Oprah Winfrey and saw something special in her. They two became fast friends and Angelou became a lifelong mentor.

In 1993, she wowed the nation again - this time on live television. At President Bill Clinton's inauguration, she read a poem she wrote for the occasion called 'On the Pulse of the Morning.' It captured the imagination of America and sales of her poems and memoirs soared.

'Every year, on that day, Coretta and I would send each other flowers,' Angelou said of King's widow, Coretta Scott King, who died in 2006.

Angelou was little known outside the theatrical community until I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which might not have happened if James Baldwin hadn't persuaded Angelou, still grieving over King's death, to attend a party at Jules Feiffer's house.



Feiffer was so taken by Angelou that he mentioned her to Random House editor Bob Loomis, who persuaded her to write a book.

Angelou's musical style was clear in a passage about boxing great Joe Louis's defeat against German fighter Max Schmeling:

'My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed and raped. A Black boy whipped and maimed. It was hounds on the trail of a man running through slimy swamps. ... If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help.'

Angelou's memoir was occasionally attacked, for seemingly opposite reasons. In a 1999 essay in Harper's, author Francine Prose criticized Caged Bird as 'manipulative' melodrama. Meanwhile, Angelou's passages about her rape and teen pregnancy have made it a perennial on the American Library Association's list of works that draw complaints from parents and educators.

'I thought that it was a mild book. There's no profanity,' Angelou told the AP.



Politically-engaged: Angelou remained so close with the Clintons that she endorsed Hillary Clinton during the 2008 Democratic primary over Barack Obama

Maya Angelou was a dancer and an actress before she found literary success with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1970



A hearse was seen pulling away from Angelou's home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, about 9am on Wednesday with a police escort

'It speaks about surviving, and it really doesn't make ogres of many people. I was shocked to find there were people who really wanted it banned, and I still believe people who are against the book have never read the book.'

Angelou appeared on several TV programs, notably the groundbreaking 1977 miniseries 'Roots.' She was nominated for a Tony Award in 1973 for her appearance in the play 'Look Away.' She directed the film 'Down in the Delta,' about a drug-wrecked woman who returns to the home of her ancestors in the Mississippi Delta.



She won three Grammys for her spoken-word albums and in 2013 received an honorary National Book Award for her contributions to the literary community.

Back in the 1960s, Malcolm X had written to Angelou and praised her for her ability to communicate so directly, with her 'feet firmly rooted on the ground.'



SHE WON THE ADMIRATION OF PRESIDENTS: BARACK OBAMA PAYS TRIBUTE TO MAYA ANGELOU

Statement from the White House:

When her friend Nelson Mandela passed away last year, Maya Angelou wrote that ;No sun outlasts its sunset, but will rise again, and bring the dawn.'

Today, Michelle and I join millions around the world in remembering one of the brightest lights of our time – a brilliant writer, a fierce friend, and a truly phenomenal woman. Over the course of her remarkable life, Maya was many things – an author, poet, civil rights activist, playwright, actress, director, composer, singer and dancer. But above all, she was a storyteller – and her greatest stories were true. A childhood of suffering and abuse actually drove her to stop speaking – but the voice she found helped generations of Americans find their rainbow amidst the clouds, and inspired the rest of us to be our best selves. In fact, she inspired my own mother to name my sister Maya. Like so many others, Michelle and I will always cherish the time we were privileged to spend with Maya. With a kind word and a strong embrace, she had the ability to remind us that we are all God’s children; that we all have something to offer. And while Maya’s day may be done, we take comfort in knowing that her song will continue, 'flung up to heaven' – and we celebrate the dawn that Maya Angelou helped bring.



In 2002, Angelou used this gift in an unexpected way when she launched a line of greeting cards with industry giant Hallmark. Angelou admitted she was cool to the idea at first. Then she went to Loomis, her editor at Random House.

'I said, "I'm thinking about doing something with Hallmark,"' she recalled. 'And he said, "You're the people's poet. You don't want to trivialize yourself." So I said "OK" and I hung up. And then I thought about it. And I thought, if I'm the people's poet, then I ought to be in the people's hands - and I hope in their hearts. So I thought, "Hmm, I'll do it."'

In North Carolina, she lived in an 18-room house and taught American Studies at Wake Forest University. She was also a member of the Board of Trustees for Bennett College, a private school for black women in Greensboro, North Carolina. Angelou hosted a weekly satellite radio show for XM's 'Oprah & Friends' channel. She also owned and renovated a townhouse in Harlem, the inside decorated in spectacular primary colors.

Active on the lecture circuit, she gave commencement speeches and addressed academic and corporate events across the country. Angelou received dozens of honorary degrees, and several elementary schools were named for her. As she approached her 80th birthday, she decided to study at the Missouri-based Unity Church, which advocates healing through prayer.

'I was in Miami and my son (Guy Johnson, her only child) was having his 10th operation on his spine. I felt really done in by the work I was doing, people who had expected things of me,' said Angelou, who then recalled a Unity church service she attended in Miami.

'The preacher came out - a young black man, mostly a white church - and he came out and said, "I have only one question to ask, and that is, 'Why have you decided to limit God?'" And I thought, "That's exactly what I've been doing." So then he asked me to speak, and I got up and said, "Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you." And I said it about 50 times, until the audience began saying it with me, "Thank you, THANK YOU!"'





