Maya Angelou’s paper trail includes a rambling, typewritten letter from James Baldwin, dated Nov. 20, 1970, addressed to “Dear, dear Sister” discussing everything from his new book to his feelings about death.
Travis Dove for The New York Times
The Schomburg Center in Harlem has acquired the personal archive of the poet Maya Angelou, above.
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The archive includes Ms. Angelou’s correspondence, revisions of her poems and other personal papers. Above, a letter from Malcolm X.
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And one from Malcolm X, written on Jan. 15, 1965, assuring her, “You can communicate because you have plenty of (soul) and you always keep your feet firmly rooted on the ground.”
And a draft of her poem “On the Pulse of Morning,” which she recited at the 1993 inauguration of President Bill Clinton, showing Ms. Angelou’s changing the first line from “Rocks and Rivers and Trees” to the final, stark version: “A Rock, A River, A Tree.”
All of these things and more — a total of 343 boxes containing her personal papers and documents — have been acquired by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The trove has notes for Ms. Angelou’s autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”; a 1982 telegram from Coretta Scott King asking her to join a celebration at the King Center; fan mail; and personal and professional correspondence with Gordon Parks, Chester Himes, Abbey Lincoln and her longtime editor, Robert Loomis.
The acquisition is to be officially announced on Friday by New York Public Library officials at a news conference with Ms. Angelou, said Howard Dodson, the executive director of the Schomburg.
“It will be the largest collection of her material,” Mr. Dodson said. “This is the collection that documents her literary career. This is a major, major, major addition to that body of documentation of the individual lives of writers and the worlds in which they lived.”
Library officials declined to disclose a purchase price for the collection. The Angelou papers were paid for with private money.
The papers are “a major coup for the Schomburg, which too often loses important papers to more monied institutions,” said Pamela Newkirk, a professor of journalism at New York University. For Professor Newkirk’s 2009 book, “Letters From Black America,” an anthology of letters written by African-Americans since the 1700s, she relied on the Schomburg archives for much of her research, she said.
The acquisition is something of a swan song for Mr. Dodson, who announced in April that he would retire in 2011. A committee is currently searching for his replacement at the Schomburg, a research library of the New York Public Library and a center for exhibitions and other cultural programs.
Ms. Angelou’s archive will become part of holdings that include some 10 million items, including the personal collections of John Henrik Clarke, Lorraine Hansberry and Malcolm X. The Schomburg, at 135th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, is also home to the original manuscript of Richard Wright’s “Native Son” and a signed first edition by Phillis Wheatley (1753-84), who has been called America’s first black female poet.
“Nothing is as precious to me as that library,” Ms. Angelou said of the Schomburg, speaking by telephone from Winston-Salem, N.C., where she is a professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University.
“For a person who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, ‘Here I am, read me,’ ” Ms. Angelou said. “Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.”
Ms. Angelou, 82, said it dawned on her that “I’d better make sure that my papers and books are taken care of, they are somewhere people can see them and read them.” As part of the New York Public Library, the Schomburg is “part of the world,” Ms. Angelou said, accessible to “students in the neighborhood and people in Tokyo and Germany.”
Ms. Angelou has placed papers and documentation of her theatrical, film and television performances at Wake Forest over the years, she said, but she maintains a personal connection to Harlem and the Schomburg. She owns a brownstone in the neighborhood and counts Mr. Dodson as a friend. She is also the Schomburg’s national membership chairwoman.
Her material has yet to be processed. Mr. Dodson said the contents included the yellow notepads on which Ms. Angelou typically scribbled in longhand, as well as typescripts and proofs or galleys of her published and unpublished work.
The collection will be available to researchers in about 18 months, and selected items will eventually be exhibited, Mr. Dodson said.
Ms. Angelou’s papers are a window on 40 years of the times and the work of a Renaissance woman who became known as a “people’s poet.” An outspoken advocate for the rights of African-Americans and women, Ms. Angelou is perhaps most famous for “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” her 1970 memoir of a childhood scarred by sexual abuse, as well as for her poems “Phenomenal Woman” and “Still I Rise.” She has won three Grammy Awards for her spoken-word albums, and President Clinton awarded her the National Medal of Arts in 2000.
Ms. Angelou said that transparency about her life and work connected her to a long African-American tradition of preserving and retelling personal history.
“Hold those things that tell your history and protect them,” she said. “During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: ‘I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.’ ”
Ms. Angelou said that Frederick Douglass used the first-person singular to talk about the story of a whole group of people. “It stands in for all of us,” she said. “We’ve been telling that story from the time of Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon.” (Hammon was another black 18th-century poet.)
For those reasons, she said, it was not difficult to part with poignant letters from James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write “Caged Bird,” and Malcolm X, whom she met in Ghana. She worked with him to build the Organization of Afro-American Unity after he parted ways with the Nation of Islam.
The Nov. 20, 1970, letter from Baldwin includes his feelings about leaving himself “wide open” in his book of conversations on race and society with Margaret Mead (“It was painful to do and even more painful to read”) and his feelings about watching Lorraine Hansberry die, as he battled his own health problems. He says of writing another book: “What for? for whom? to whom?”
And he throws out this seeming non sequitur a few lines later: “No one will believe that I wanted children.” He ended the letter with a handwritten request: “When I option ‘Soledad Brother’ would you consider working on the scenario with me?”
Paul LeClerc, president of the New York Public Library, who will also step down in 2011, said the acquisition of the papers was a reflection of the importance of the Schomburg to the library’s mission.
“A great library,” he said, “never stops buying.”
Correction: October 27, 2010
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the 18th-century black poet Jupiter Hammon.
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