Maya Angelou Legacy

Maya Angelou, a well-known African American author is best known for her autobiographies and her poems. Her legacy that she left behind is the hope, strength, and fortitude that she inspires not only in African American women but in all women in general. Throughout all of her work, there is a common topic that she embodies about overcoming social obstacles and the struggle for self-acceptance. There is also the themes of love, loss, rejection, social acceptance, racial differences, resistance and national consciousness. Some more themes that apply to both her poems and her life are of women, power, and poetry and these themes limit every assumption that people made in the 20th century. She uses her poetry and autobiographies to show the differences

Louis and Stamps, Arkansas where she lived with her brother and her her father’s mother, her grandmother. In the poem, she discusses a very sensitive situation. When she was seven years old, her mother’s boyfriend had cuddled and raped her. He was murdered by Maya’s uncles for what he had done, and this made Maya feel like it was her fault so she stopped talking. She wouldn’t talk for about 5 years until she turned 12 when Mrs. Flowers who was an educated black woman, got her to talk again. Mrs. Flowers is a character in a child in a children’s book who had strongly articulated the importance of speaking and education and this got her to love poetry. Maya then went to George Washington high school and took lessons in dance and drama on a scholarship that she had gotten to California Labor School. She then gave birth to a son, and worked as the first female and black street car conductor. She had to work multiple jobs to support herself. She also worked as a fry cook in hamburger places, a dinner cook in a Creole restaurant, a shake dancer in a night club, and also once had a job in a mechanics shop. This is how some parents are in today’s world. They have to work multiple jobs because some are either not educated enough to earn a degree doing something they love or they can’t afford secondary schooling so they need to work multiple part-time job in order to make ends meet. Maya talks about the struggles she has with money and trying to support her family and although it was incredibly hard on her, she was able to do it. This is what she is trying to tell society now, to work as hard as you can, get an education and follow your dreams wherever it may take you and that all the hard work you do will pay off in the