Black Literary Giants: Phillis Wheatley and Maya Angelou

Centuries apart, two Black women poets, Phillis Wheatley and Maya Angelou, upended US literature.

On January 20, 1993, Maya Angelou rose in front of the U.S. Capitol building and recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning." It was the first inauguration of Bill Clinton, she was the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost spoke at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961. She was also the first women and first Black poet to receive this honor.

Born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928, Maya Angelou would become America’s best known living poet, memoirist and civil rights activist. She published several books of poetry, seven autobiographies including her first, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,’ which brought her international recognition, three books of essays, and a long list of plays, movies, and television shows. 

At 16 she became the first Black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco and at 17, a mother.  She married briefly and began her creative path, first as a dancer. Changing her name to Maya Angelou she danced in clubs and toured Europe, learning languages and meeting writers, novelists and activists who encouraged her to move to New York.  There she traveled in literary circles which encouraged her to begin writing and acting and she became friends with Civil Rights leaders, including the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She became a speaker and an organizer for Civil Rights, here and abroad. Her friends and associates were the ‘A list’ of ‘60s literary and artistic culture, King and Malcom X, James Baldwin, Jules Feiffer, Roscoe Lee Browne, Ruby Dee, James Earl Jones and Godfrey Cambridge. She produced plays and television scripts and wrote articles, living a full creative life before her breakthrough autobiographical novel, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.  Taking its title from a poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, ‘Caged’ told the story of her traumatic childhood of abuse and racism, her years of recovery and how she literally reclaimed her voice. It was an instant bestseller and established her reputation as literary giant.        

Respected as a spokesperson for Blacks and women, she taught and lectured well into her 80s. Years after her death at 86 in 2014, Maya is remembered through her many volumes, her awards and citations, and soon her own museum, the Maya Angelou House and Celebrate! Maya Project Headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Visit Boston’s Commonwealth Mall and you’ll see the city’s Women’s Memorial, statues dedicated to Abigail Adams, Lucy Stone and Phillis Wheatley, the first published enslaved and first published Black woman poet in the Western world. But who was she?

Born in West Africa in 1753, she was sickly seven-year-old when she arrived in Boston and sold to John and Susanna Wheatley as a house maid. The couple named her ‘Phillis’ after the ship that carried her to America. While they never excused her from her household duties the Wheatleys did offer the girl an education, a rare opportunity for an enslaved female.

Phillis proved to be an excellent student. First tutored by the Wheatley’s daughter Mary and son Ben, she quickly learned to read and by 12 she was inhaling the Bible, the works of Milton and Pope and the classics of Virgil, Ovid and Homer in their original Latin and Greek; she studied history, geography and astronomy and she began to write.  

In December 1767 she saw her first poem published in the Newport, Rhode Island, Mercury. “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin” was written in response to news accounts of a miraculous survival at sea by the two men. She was 13. 

It was ‘An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of that Celebrated Divine, and Eminent Servant of Jesus Christ, the Reverend and Learned George Whitefield’ three years later that established her reputation. First published in Boston, Newport, and Philadelphia, the poem was included in Whitefield’s London funeral sermon in 1771, bringing her international attention.

Her 1773 volume "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral" was the first book published by an African writer in America.

Wheatley gathered a collection of 28 poems for publication.  With the help of Mrs. Wheatley, she looked for subscribers to underwrite the volume but the colonists were apparently unwilling to support literature, especially from an enslaved African woman. 

In London, the Countess of Huntingdon Selina Hastings, a rich supporter of evangelical and abolitionist causes, read her elegy and handed her work to British bookseller, Archibald Bell.  Accompanied by Ben Phillis traveled to London where she was greeted by fellow poets, philanthropists, abolitionists and a fellow colonial American, Benjamin Franklin.  

Before Bell agreed to publish her work he insisted that she prove that she was indeed the author. Returning to Boston Phillis stood before a panel of 18 men deemed “the most respectable characters in Boston” to determine whether she, an enslaved young, African, Black female could possibly write such deliver such elegant work.  She not only passed, their findings were including in the American publication the next year. 

As she was writing and publishing and corresponding with religious and political figures including General George Washington, John Hancock and Benjamin Rush, Phillis Wheatley was still a slave.  She slept in the family’s servant quarters and had household responsibilities to perform. It wasn’t until 1774, just before Susanna’s death that she was manumitted and freed.  She would remain in the Wheatley home until John and then Mary passed, leaving her on her own for the first time.

By 1779, Wheatley had a second full volume of poems but she was unable to publish it; the ongoing war effort drained resources and without the Wheatley’s connections she couldn’t find subscribers.    

With limited options she married a free Black named John Peters, a laborer, a grocer and bar owner, a barber, baker and sometime lawyer and occasional doctor.  Burdened by the limited opportunities for Blacks, his business plans were not enough to keep them afloat, and Phillis worked as a laundress and charwoman to help support them.  He was in debtor’s prison when Phillis died in 1784 at age 31, just after giving birth to a daughter who would not survive her.

No one knows for sure where Phillis was buried.  Some believe she lies in an unmarked grave at The Granary Burying Ground where John Wheatley was buried, others think she was buried in Copp’s Hill Burying Ground.

Her final collection was lost although a few of its poems and essays were printed in local papers and pamphlets.

Historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote of Phillis’s impact on her world, calling her the  ‘most famous African on the face of the earth." Voltaire wrote to a friend that Wheatley had proved that black people could write poetry while naval hero John Paul Jones delivered some of his personal writings to "Phillis the African favorite of the Nine (muses) and Apollo.” Today she is remembered through the many schools named for her across the country, on the Boston Commonwealth Mall and at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.