Maya Angelou Accomplishments

“Nothing will work unless you do.”-Maya Angelou. Nothing was working in her life, so she started to work to be successful. She knew that her life was not going to get better on its own, she started working anywhere she could to try and be as successful as possible. She did not have it easy growing up, receiving poor treatment from men as a child, living in a segregated town, leaving home at age seventeen with a newborn to start a new life, are things that most people can not overcome. Hard work, dedication, and the drive to overcome difficulties is how Maya Angelou rose above the challenges she faced in her life to become successful. Marguerite Johnson better known as Maya Angelou was born on April 4, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri (Maya Angelou).

She fell in love with works by William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe. Angelou thought that she had limited career options and that she was not going to live a very good life. Instead of just accepting her fate, Angelou went out and became a singer, dancer, actress, composer and director (Maya Angelou). It was not until a friend of Angelou, James Baldwin, heard about her childhood stories and encouraged Angelou to write about them. Instead of being sad and feeling down about her childhood Angelou chose to write about it and encourage others to not be afraid (Wiloch,

She would go to church and stand in front of the congregation, she knew that everyone was staring at her. She knew that she was not a white girl with blonde hair, she was a young black girl with a gap between her teeth and dark hair. Angelou’s theme in her poem “Caged Bird” is that a white person free of troubles travels with ease, but a black person travels in fear always worrying about what others are doing (Caged Bird). That was Angelou’s childhood life, she was always on edge and worrying about what others thought of her (Maya