Angelou left Ghana when her friend Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) asked her to join him in New York and help him create an Organization of African-American Unity. As soon as she arrived, she phoned him to tell him that she would first spend time with her family in California. Within 48 hours came the devastating news of Malcolm's assassination.
With the help of her wise mother, her beloved brother and her loyal sister-friends, she picked herself up and found work: singing in a Hawaii nightclub and doing market research in Watts, the black area of Los Angeles. In 1965 she watched, deliberately courting arrest, as the area erupted into violent riots.