Harriet Tubman, Fredrick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Malcom X are all names that bring to mind the struggle African Americans have faced in the past. All of these figures are memorialized as influential activist who have had a great impact on the lives of Americans today. Maya Angelou, an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist, is one of the few black women in history who have used literate to display their struggles. Angelou is best known for her books, including a series of seven autobiographies, starting with the most famous, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. Throughout many of her books and poems, Maya Angelou shares her encounters of racism, sexism, and rape in the Jim Crow South. The hardships Maya Angelou experienced can be traced through her early life, her memoir I Know Why The …show more content…
1). Angelou’s parents split up when she was very young, so she and her brother Bailey were sent to live with their grandmother (“Maya Angelou Biography” par. 14). Despite having their grandmother, Momma, and Uncle Willie to substitute for their absent parents, Maya Angelou endured a rough childhood in the south full of first hand racial prejudices and discrimination. Not soon after a family member witnessed the lynching of a black man, Angelou was sent to live with her mother in San Francisco, California. She later, “became pregnant [during] her senior year [of high school] and graduated a few weeks before giving birth to her son, Guy. She left home at 16 and took on the difficult life of a single mother, supporting herself and her son (“America’s Renaissance Woman” par. 3). As a way to provide for her son, Angelou worked as a night club waitress, but this career helped her get discovered by a theater group. (“Maya Angelou is Born” par. 2). This was only the beginning of her successful