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Maya Angelou Accomplishments

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Marguerite Annie Johnson (better known as Maya Angelou) was born April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri. Angelou’s childhood was overwhelmed by turmoil. After her parents’ divorce, Angelou and her older brother Bailey were sent to her paternal grandmother’s home in Stamps, Arkansas. Angelou’s time in Arkansas exposed her to the brutality and racial discrimination of the south. It is also provided her grandmother Annie Henderson with a chance to teach Angelou about Christian values, respect, independence, courage, and forgiveness. Young Angelou spent time in her time helping in the family owned grocery store, which also doubled as the family home for herself, Bailey, her disabled Uncle Willie, and her grandmother (Angelou, Caged Bird 5-7). At …show more content…

This is when she met a teacher named Mrs. Bertha Flowers; Flowers helped Angelou find her voice again through teaching her about communication and reading popular literary works aloud (Angelou, Caged Bird 98-101).
To protect Maya and Bailey from racial discrimination, their grandmother sent them to live in San Francisco, California, where their mother had been living for some time. In California, Angelou experiences homelessness and her father’s alcoholism, but she has many accomplishments, such as becoming the first African American streetcar conductor in San Francisco and graduating high school (Angelou, Caged Bird 237-245,267-269). Soon after graduating, Angelou gave birth to her son (Angelou, Caged Bird 289-290).
In order to take care of her son, Angelou did any job she could find; her long list of jobs included a cook, waitress, army recruit, dancer, prostitute, restaurant manager, and chauffeur. Some of the jobs Angelou took on were dangerous and demeaning, but her encounter with a drug addict showed her the effects of the life Angelou had been living. Angelou then decides to turn her life around for her son; knowing the change would be tough, Angelou writes, “For the first time I sat down defenseless to await life's next assault” (Angelou, Gather Together

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