“You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like, air, I’ll rise.”
-Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou was truly a jack of all trades: single mother, dancer, sex worker, dancer, calypso singer, streetcar conductor, magazine editor in Cairo, administrative assistant in Ghana, official of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, friend to activists and revolutionaries like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom (the highest award a civilian can receive), playwright, autobiographer, poet, among other things. Before she was any of these things, however, she was a civil rights activist.
Angelou was born in Missouri as Marguerite Ann Johnson; but, after her parents divorced, she and her brother were raised in Arkansas by her grandmother. She experienced the injustices and racism of the Jim Crow South firsthand. Around age 7, when she went to go visit her mother, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. After he was tried and found guilty, her uncles killed him in retaliation. Believing that her words had brought about the man’s death, Angelou refused to speak, essentially becoming mute for the next five years. Her love of literature was the only thing that eventually brought language back to her. As a teenager, she lived with her mother in San Francisco, studying dance and theater as well as becoming the first black woman to be a streetcar conductor there. She became pregnant at the age of 16 and gave birth to her son, Guy Johnson. She struggled to raise her son as a single mother, working all kinds of odd jobs to support them, including prostitution when times became desperate. After a failed marriage to a Greek sailor named Tosh Angelos, she began to travel and perform, singing and dancing under the name Maya Angelou.
All of these experiences led her to her work as a civil rights activist. When she settled in New York, 
she joined the Harlem Writers Guild while also singing to supplement her income. She helped organize a revue to raise funds for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization that had been founded by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others; after they saw how successful her revue had been, they asked her to become the coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s New York office. Although she was first inspired by King to pursue life as an activist, she later began to doubt the effectiveness of his methods out of frustration at the lack of social change. She eventually began to work more with Malcolm X, favoring the more direct and aggressive approach to achieving societal change.
In the late 1960s, Angelou became romantically involved with Vusumzi L. Make, a South African civil rights activist. She moved with him to Cairo where she became the associate editor of The Arab Observer, a magazine there. This is where she first met Nelson Mandela, a close friend of hers (after his death, she wrote a poem in his honor). She eventually left Make, as he was too controlling. She then moved to Accra, Ghana, where she was an administrative assistant at the University of Ghana. While in Ghana, she led a march on the American Embassy at Accra during King’s famous march on Washington, calling for an end to segregation and the apartheid.
She eventually returned to New York, where she helped Malcolm X set up his Organization of Afro-American Unity in 1964. This did not last long, however, as the group dissolved after his assassination a year later.
In 1968, Dr. King requested that she travel to promote his upcoming “Poor People’s Campaign.” She agreed, but before she could begin her tour, she learned that Martin Luther King had been assassinated on her birthday, April 4, 1968. Angelou stopped celebrating her birthday for years after this and sent flowers to Coretta Scott King, King’s widow, for more than thirty years until Coretta’s death in 2006. After Dr. King’s death, Angelou also began to focus more on her writing.
She published her most famous memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, one year after Martin Luther King’s death four years after Malcolm X’s death in 1969. This autobiography began at her birth and ended at the birth of Angelou’s son when she was 17. It was the first in a series of seven auto biographies. The were Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002), and Mom & Me & Mom (2013).
Even the tragic deaths of her friends could not stop her activism; her writing was still infused with the feelings of the civil rights movement.This was especially noticeable in her poem “On the Pulse of Morning,” which she composed and recited for President Clinton’s inauguration. In 2010, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom award from Obama for her contributions to the civil rights movement. She passed away on May 28, 2014. The world mourned the loss of someone who helped change its perspective on people of color worldwide that day.
Her poetry and literature continues to inspire people to this day. Her memoirs and autobiographies show how far we have come, while her more recent poetry shows how far we still have to go.
Of course, we must ask the question, “What made Maya Angelou so unafraid to speak out and start revolutions?” I believe that there are multiple factors that contributed to this. She, like many other activists and revolutionaries before her, lived through injustice. She clearly saw a need and, knowing that if she didn’t do it, it might not happen, she stepped up to take a role. She, unlike other activists we have analyzed, was not always at the forefront of the struggle. While in some cases–like in Ghana–she led the people, in others, she took on a more supporting role–such as when she helped raise money for Dr. King or helped establish organizations that others got the credit for. Not only that, but she didn’t always speak out with her voice. Sometimes, such as after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., she spoke out through other mediums, such as her poetry or her autobiographies.
I feel that this is something we could all learn from. We don’t necessarily have to speak out verbally. There are other, more passive, yet just as effective and influential, methods of inciting change. Like Maya Angelou, we can start change through our talents, through art, through mediums besides our own literal voices. The resulting metaphorical voice can be just as effective, if not more so today, in our current social media-dominated world.
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http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/remembering-maya-angelou/moment-time-obama-awards-maya-angelou-medal-freedom-2010-n116286
http://www.biography.com/people/maya-angelou-9185388
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/maya-angelou-radical-activist#52461