Maya Angelou

1282 Words3 Pages

‘It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.’ ‘It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.’ Maya Angelou is considered one of the most well-known poets. She has written a number of poems that inspire and help people with their daily lives. She has an “insatiable hunger to learn and experience all that life has to offer” (Gale Biography in Context, "Maya Angelou: More than a Poet") which makes her poems meaningful. However, Maya Angelou had many pieces that considered equality due to her experience …show more content…

In the mid-1950s, Angelou's career as a performer began to take off. She landed a role in a touring production of Porgy and Bess, later appearing in the off-Broadway production Calypso Heat Wave (1957) and releasing her first album, Miss Calypso (1957). A member of the Harlem Writers Guild and a civil rights activist, Angelou organized and starred in the musical revue Cabaret for Freedom as a benefit for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, also serving as the SCLC's northern coordinator. Angelou also held a position at the University of Ghana for a time.After returning to the United States, Angelou was urged by friend and fellow writer James Baldwin to write about her life experiences. Her efforts resulted in the enormously successful 1969 memoir about her childhood and young adult years, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which made literary history as the first nonfiction best-seller by an African-American woman. The poignant work also made Angelou an international …show more content…

This has been a very sensitive issue for many decades. Throughout the poem Maya Angelou uses “my” in reference to herself as a colored woman while also reciting the poem in a first person narrative as if she speaks for her entire race. She poses questions to what seems to be the women of the Caucasian race based on society’s judgments of colored woman. During the time the poem was composed, woman of color were looked upon as inferior to Caucasian women because they were of a lower socioeconomic class. Maya Angelou attempts to build confidence and levels of self-esteem in other African-American woman by creating analogies equating their sense of worth to things of rare

More about Maya Angelou

Open Document