Maya Angelou Research Paper

Maya Angelou: Strength of the Human Spirit

“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty,” [are the famous words of former author, singer, dancer, and poet, Maya Angelou. This famous role model has won many awards, including two NAACP Image Awards in the outstanding literary work category, achieved many goals by becoming an activist, and left many marks on the world in her various poems, stories, and biographies. She was beyond successful and carried out a career like no other. Not only has she lived what most people would call an amazing life, but she worked her way towards it using every pound of her strength in doing so. ] Maya Angelou was, without a doubt, one of the

Maya Angelou was born on April 4, 1928, In St. Louis, Missouri, as Marguerite Johnson (Bio.com). She had a very difficult childhood. Her parents split up when she was very young, and she and her older brother, Bailey, were sent to live with their grandmother, Anne Henderson, in Stamps, Arkansas(Bio.com). At the time, Angelou experienced discrimination and firsthand racial prejudices being an African American. She also suffered from racial abuse after being raped at the age of seven by her mother's boyfriend. In addition to the assault, Angelou's uncles killed the boyfriend. Angelou was so traumatized by the experience that she stopped talking. She later returned to Arkansas and spent years as a virtual mute( Bio.com). After her depressing childhood years, Angelou began her journey to success. She attended George Washington High School in San Francisco and took lessons in dance and drama on a scholarship at the California Labor

James Baldwin, a famous writer at the time, was one of Angelou’s biggest influences. He urged Angelou to write about her life experiences(Bio.com). Her efforts resulted in the massively successful 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. Inspired by Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy,” Angelou contrasts the struggles of a bird attempting to rise above the limitations of adverse surroundings with the flight of a bird that is free. She seeks to create in the reader an emotional look towards the difficulty of the misused, captured creature—a symbol of victimized African Americans and their experiences(enotes.com). When Angelou begin telling the story of her life, everything she wrote was set at a period in her life of racial segregation inspired by a close friend and public figure, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Although, Angelou wrote about segregation because of her past experiences, critics believe she became an icon out of the guilt of others. A 2014 blog by Thomas Lifson says everything a public figure would fear to read about themselves. Lifsons article states, “But an icon of victimhood as a badge of honor, cultivating a voice, a manner, a persona that embodied dignity, thereby triggering waves of adulation from those who, out of guilt or hope, devoutly