Reports from Winston-Salem TV station WXII confirm that the prolific civil rights author, poet, and speaker died at her home in North Carolina this morning.
Two independent sources confirmed Angelou's death to WXII's Wanda Starke Tuesday morning. She was 86.
A police car and an ambulance were seen outside Angelou's home around 8:30 a.m. Winston-Salem police said they are at the home to investigate a death.
Angelou, a Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University, was born April 4, 1928, in St. Louis. In the 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asked Angelou to serve as northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Angelou received many accolades, including the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000 and the Lincoln Medal in 2008.
The world is truly a darker place in her absence. "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings" should be standard reading in American classrooms. I'll never forget her reciting her poem "On The Pulse Of The Morning" at Bill Clinton's first inauguration in 1993, either. Here it is:
Her work will live on.
I saw Mister Snowden's little tee vee performance, and all I have to say is that I have worked with classified materials, I have supervised know it all twentysomethings, and I am not in the least impressed by this effort to paint himself as some kind of superspy.
ReplyDeleteAs Kinsley correctly asked, do we really want Ed Snowden making important national security decisions? That's why we have elected officials and an elaborate oversight structure. The cynical are going to mock, but then bomb throwers will throw bombs.