Why Is Maya Angelou Important

T’ya Williams
Ms. Keller
American Literature
14 April, 2016
The Amazing Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou was and is still known for her amazing and powerful poems that she has written throughout her life. The events that had happened to her in her early life are what made her who she was and more. She cared so much about fighting for our freedom as black people, so she became a civil rights activist and wrote poems about the struggles that black people had back in the day. After she overcame the fear of talking, that lasted for 5 years straight, she blossomed into one of the most influential people America/The World has ever seen. Maya Angelou’s early life experiences led her to become a strong and powerful and influential woman. She used her life
So, during the late 1960’s and early ‘70’s Maya also became a civil rights activist. She wrote poems to help encourage women to be part of the civil rights movement. She was really close friends with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was also assassinated on her birthday which was April 4, 1968. After this event she never celebrates her birthday again, instead she takes flowers to his wife Mrs. King until she dies in 2004. Another historical event was when Maya became the first black female streetcar driver when she was only 16 years old. When she told her mother about her wanting a job as a streetcar driver, her mother did not get in her way and let her go downtown and ask for a job. So every morning her mom would give her money for lunch. When Maya first arrived she would sit outside the office everyday for 2 weeks straight before the secretaries got to work and came back for lunch and left to go home from work. She says that every time they passed her the would say negative things such as negative slurs. After the 2 weeks of sitting outside the office the man comes out of his office and tells her to come here and why she wants to work as a streetcar driver and she simply said “I like the uniforms, and I like people.” And then she got hired. In her older days ahe was named one of America’s “National Treasure”. “She has been a writer in residence and a professor at numerous universities
They were like family to her. When she started to work with Martin L. King Jr. in the 1960’s, Dr. King asked her to go with them to go around the country raising money for the civil rights movement group to go to Washington D.C. She promised him she would go the day after her birthday but he was assassinated on her birthday which left her very devastated that she stayed in her apartment for 2 weeks straight and didn’t speak to anyone. While she was in her apartment all that time she began something that became critically acclaimed, “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings”. She said this book saved her life. Because she thought about how King could forgive people so she began to forgive people and herself. She was friends with Oprah Winfrey. Oprah referred to her as her mentor, mother, sister, and friend. And they have been friends since Oprah’s early 20’s. Maya would talk to Oprah about everything even her personal life and her past because they had similar thing happen to them during their childhood. Oprah says at her funeral that “she will always be the rainbow in my clouds”. She was friends with Cicely Tyson. They first