“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time,” said poet Maya Angelou in an interview with Oprah Winfrey on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1997. At her core, Maya Angelou was a witness. She observed the world, its cruelty, its beauty, its contradictions, and transformed what she saw into a language that lasted the moment it described. Writer and activist were never really separated in her. Writing was activism. The protest was poetry.
What does the quote mean?
Maya Angelou said these words during a candid television interview with Oprah Winfrey in 1997—one of many deeply personal exchanges the two women shared over the decades of their friendship. The context was human relationships: the patterns of hurt, denial, and false hope that keep people attached to those who have already proven through their actions exactly who they are.
Read also | Roger Federer Quote of the Day: “There’s no way around hard work”
Angelou went on to write six more volumes of autobiography, several collections of poetry, and numerous essays. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom – the United States’ highest civilian honor – from President Barack Obama in 2011. She died on May 28, 2014 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina at the age of 86.
Maya Angelou’s early life and personal journey
Angelou’s early life was marked by trauma, displacement, and resilience that defined both her character and her art. At the age of eight, she was sexually assaulted by her mother’s boyfriend, a man named Freeman.
When she exposed the abuse and Freeman was subsequently killed, presumably by her uncles, young Maya Angelou fell into a silence that lasted nearly five years, convinced that her voice had caused the man’s death.
It was a teacher and family friend of the Stamps, a woman named Bertha Flowers, who talked her back into language, reading her poetry aloud and insisting that she learn to love words again. Angelou later said it was the intervention that saved her life.
As a teenager, Maya Angelou became the first African-American streetcar conductor in San Francisco. At sixteen she gave birth to a son, Guy Johnson, whom she raised largely on her own during years of considerable financial difficulty.
In her youth, Maya Angelou worked a variety of extraordinary jobs—chef, nightclub dancer, prostitute, singer, and actress—experiences she wrote about with unflinching honesty. She was briefly married twice.
Activism by Maya Angelou
Angelou’s political commitments were inseparable from her art. At the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, she was a prominent figure in the American Civil Rights Movement, working directly alongside Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X—two men whose approaches to racial justice differed sharply, but whom she admired and supported.
At the invitation of King, she served as the Northern Coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, helping to organize fundraising and community outreach. The assassination of King on April 4, 1968—which fell on her birthday—devastated her so deeply that she refused to celebrate her birthday for years, instead sending flowers to King’s widow, Coretta Scott King.
Maya Angelou spent several years in Africa in the 1960s, living in Egypt and Ghana, where she worked as a journalist and editor and became part of a wider community of African-American expatriates who chose to live on the continent. This experience deepened her understanding of the African diaspora and greatly sharpened her politics.
In her later decades, Angela remained an outspoken advocate for racial justice, gender equality, and the dignity of marginalized communities. She recited her poem On the Pulse of Morning at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton in 1993, becoming only the second poet in American history to recite at a presidential inauguration. The poem was a public act of testimony to history, suffering and the possibility of renewal.
Interesting facts about Maya Angelou
- Maya Angelou spoke six languages. In addition to English, Angelou was fluent in French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and Fanti, the Ghanaian language. Her language skills went far beyond the written word.
- Maya Angelou worked as a calypso singer and dancer. In the early 1950s, Angelou performed under the stage name “Rita” in San Francisco nightclubs and appeared in a touring production of Porgy and Bess, touring Europe and Africa with the cast.
- Maya Angelou was a close friend of both James Baldwin and Malcolm X. Her literary and political friendships were extraordinary in every way. Baldwin, one of America’s greatest novelists, was a trusted and creative sparring partner. Malcolm X recruited her to help build the Organization of African-American Unity shortly before his assassination in 1965.
- Maya Angelou wrote the book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings about courage. Editor and cartoonist Jules Feiffer reportedly told his editor that Angelou was the most remarkable autobiographer he had ever heard—and that the editor, Robert Loomis of Random House, encouraged Angelou to write her memoirs and told her that it was nearly impossible to write an autobiography as literature. She accepted the challenge.
- Maya Angelou had a street named after her before she died. In 2013, the city of Winston-Salem, North Carolina — where she lived for decades — named a stretch of road Maya Angelou Way in her honor when she could still see it.
- Maya Angelou Commemorative Stamp Breaks US Postal Service Records After her death in 2014, the US Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp with her image and quote. It became one of the most popular stamps in the history of the service.
- Oprah Winfrey called her “the mother I never had”. The two women met in the late 1970s and remained extremely close until Angelou’s death. Winfrey credited Angela’s guidance — including the above quote — as a formative force in her own life and career.
