NEW YORK — It was New York’s turn to say goodbye to Maya Angelou.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison were among those sharing memories of the late author and Renaissance woman artist Friday at The Riverside Church in Manhattan, a few blocks west of a Harlem town house that Angelou owned in recent years.
From a stage brightened by beds of white roses, it was a chance for friends and family members to pay tribute before hundreds of attendees and for the city itself to claim at least part of her legacy.
Angelou, who died May 28 at age 86, had lived off and on in New York in the 1950s and ’60s and visited often even after she moved to North Carolina, her primary residence over the latter half of her life. As a New Yorker, she appeared in numerous stage productions, was a member of the Harlem Writers Guild and directed the New York office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
New York was the “center of her universe,” said Howard Dodson Jr., director emeritus of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, to which Angelou donated her papers. From the city, she “radiated out to the world” and the world responded in kind. The program was organized by the Schomburg Center, The Riverside Church and Angelou’s longtime publisher, Random House.