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Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, to Bailey and Vivian Baxter Johnson. When she was three years old, her parents divorced, and Angelou and her brother, Bailey, Jr., were sent to live with their grandmother Mrs. Annie Henderson in Stamps, Arkansas. Mrs. Henderson operated a general store, and the children's lives revolved around the members of the all-black community who gathered at the store to shop and talk. When Angelou was seven, she and Bailey returned to live with their mother in St. Louis, where Angelou was raped by her mother's boyfriend. This traumatic event and the court proceedings that followed caused Angelou to withdraw from everyone except Bailey, and led her mother to return the children to Stamps. After graduating from the eighth grade, Angelou, along with Bailey, rejoined her mother in San Francisco and stayed there for the remainder of her teenage years. She dropped out of school, worked as a conductor on the......

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Approximate Pages: 3 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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