When Maya Angelou returns from Ghana the first person she calls is Malcolm X.

She wants to spend some time with her mother and brother in San Francisco before she begins working with Malcolm in New York.

Then Malcolm is assassinated.

Devastated, Maya is shocked by people's apathetic reaction to the news.

Maya Angelou's memoir dramatised in five parts by Patricia Cumper.

Narrator, older Maya ...... Adjoa Andoh
Maya ...... Pippa Bennett-Warner
Malcolm X ...... Don Gilet
Bailey ...... Samuel Anderson
Mother ...... Ellen Thomas

The books that make up the life and times of Maya Angelou are some of the best, most beautiful and haunting pieces of autobiography written.

They run the gamut from life affirming to tragedy and back again with a tone that is a joyous, direct and searingly honest, and are an extraordinary portrait of 20th-century black America.

Director: Pauline Harris

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in February 2019. Show less