Maya Angelou Civil Rights Movement

Maya Angelou was an American poet who went through three wars, segregation and racial discrimination, yet she has come to be known for her amazing poetry. Her works have influenced generations of people to stand up for civil rights and paramountly themselves. She began writing in a the Civil Rights Movement in the modern period where she worked closely with the movement’s leaders. Most of her works are a written in a style that expresses the experiences of her life as a black woman in a prejudiced American society. Her struggles however don’t stop at racial prejudices, when she was a young girl she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend, bore a son at the age of 16 and had to work small jobs to be able to support her child and herself. She began …show more content…
Maya worked mainly during the modern and the postmodern period, writing in their civil rights period. The modern period of civil rights reform can be divided into several phases, each beginning with isolated, small-scale protests and ultimately resulting in the emergence of new, more militant movements, leaders, and organizations. The Brown decision demonstrated that the litigation strategy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) could undermine the legal foundations of southern segregationist practices, but the strategy worked only when blacks, acting individually or in small groups, assumed the risks associated with crossing racial barriers. The crossing of barriers was the work of Angelou, her pieces took risks and broke barriers. This period was sparked …show more content…
These famous African-American authors heavily influenced her style. “That [the author] chooses to recreate the past in its own sounds suggests to the reader that she accepts the past and recognizes its beauty and its ugliness, its assets and its liabilities, its strengths and its weaknesses. Here we witness a return to the final acceptance of the past in the return to and full acceptance of its language, the language a symbolic construct of a way of life.” (AALBC 2012) Indeed, Angelou’s poetry can also be traced to African-American oral traditions like slave and work songs, especially in her use of personal narrative and emphasis on individual responses to hardship, oppression and loss. Angelou once said "Once I got into it I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass—the slave narrative—speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning 'we.' And what a responsibility. Trying to work with that form, the autobiographical mode, to change it, to make it bigger, richer, finer, and more inclusive in the twentieth century has been a great challenge for me." Ultimately Maya Angelou's style testifies to her reaffirmation of self-acceptance, which she achieves