From those who fought for civil rights to those longing for affordable health care, increased minimum wages, and to be treated fairly and respectfully, social and artistic icon Maya Angelou offered thousands upon thousands of words of encouragement.
A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Angelou used her own personal struggles that were ugly, scarring, and unattractive, turning them into phonetic collections of beauty.
A figure of inspiration since 1969, Angelou’s scribes found their way into television shows, radio programs, magazines, and now computer screens. In the era of the information superhighway and social networking, her quotes are but a click away.
Her life and career heralded the world over, Angelou spent great lengths of it professionally and personally pressing the right buttons, engaging the gears of the mind and spirit.
Each of her 7 memoirs – I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together in My Name, Singin and Swingin and Getting Merry Like Christmas, The Heart of a Woman, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, A Song Flung Up to Heaven, and Mom & Me & Mom – plus more than a dozen poetry collections, employed the oldest technology most can acknowledge; this being the turning of pages from left to right, reading each of them from left to right, top to bottom.
When news broke Maya Angelou had passed away May 28, 2014, it was like reading the last page of an epic adventure story. It was one that spanned generations with an emotional ending no one wanted to believe would come. Streams of tears followed. This might be your story. Or maybe it belongs to a loved one, perhaps even a friend of a close friend.
Angelou put her honesty, her pain, her victories and defeats on paper, then strew them across a timetable. Readers will continue to happen along; they’ll pick some up, read them, be encouraged and inspired by them, and then share them.
This could be just what’s needed to believe they too can have a future of note. |THIS.
[By Mr. Joe Walker]
