It is a profound and humbling honor for The American to join in representing this community when the world loses a very special person from St. Louis who is African American. We consider it a sacred duty to record the passing of those great figures who emerged from the black community in St. Louis and had the vision, passion and tenacity to transform St. Louis, the United States and even, in some rare cases, the world. This week we grieve the loss of two such beloved figures: Bertha Gilkey and Maya Angelou.
In addition to being born in St. Louis, these two black women have in common the fact that each was sent to be raised by grandparents in the South, albeit 20 years apart (Angelou was born in 1928, Gilkey in 1948). Their life directions diverged, at that point. Angelou left the South for California and a career in the performing arts that would eventually make her one of the most widely influential and beloved writers in the world. Gilkey left the South to return to St. Louis, where she joined a tenants’ rights movement in public housing that she would eventually help lead to national prominence. What both shared, most deeply, was the ability to move other people.
Angelou moved people foremost through language, both on the page and in performance. She was an inspirational writer and performer, thanked by countless people all over the world for giving their lives hope and direction. “From a childhood of poverty and abuse in rural Arkansas to the pinnacle of world renown, recognition and even celebrity, she seemed always to carry an air, an aura, that said, ‘Here I am, a fountain of positive energy, dip into me,’” the St. Louis poet K. Curtis Lyle writes in an essay we will publish next week. “I hesitate to use the word ‘healer,’” Curtis added, “because it sounds a bit mystical and a little too precious.” Maya’s core readers, however, would never hesitate to use the word “healer.” Without question, in addition to being an inspirational writer and teacher, Maya was a healer.
Bertha Gilkey, by contrast, was a grinder. She was an organizer and a negotiator. She did not plumb her emotional depths and provide guidance to others who might need help on their spiritual journey. She knocked on doors, participated in meetings, organized pickets and lobbied legislators. She woke people up. Her organizing skill soon moved beyond the public housing projects where she first found her voice and came to encompass the corridors of legislative and policy-making power. She leveraged the latent power of her low-income community to force changes in St. Louis governmental policy that eventually reached Washington, D.C. and the White House.
And there, again, Bertha Gilkey and Maya Angelou converge. Both of these black women, born in St. Louis and reared in humble circumstances, came to command the attention of presidents of the United States. President George H.W. Bush visited Cochran Gardens in St. Louis in 1992 to praise Gilkey’s efforts in organizing tenants’ rights, and two U.S. presidents summoned Angelou to Washington, D.C.: President-elect Bill Clinton in 1993 to read a poem at his inauguration, and President Barack Obama in 2011 to award her a Medal of Freedom, our nation’s highest civilian honor.
“Bertha could talk to anybody, from a Fortune 500 CEO to an alderman to a community organizer,” her beloved son-in-law Rick Shuford said. “She could talk to anybody at the table.” The same, precisely, can be said of Maya Angelou. St. Louis poet Shirley Bradley LeFlore said that Maya took her personal experience as a black woman “and connected most of us in the world.” We are so much better connected, and so much stronger, because these two great human beings lived. We join their families, friends, admirers and supporters in mourning them deeply and giving thanks for them.
