Maya Angelou Newsletter: March 2020

As I was growing I really didn’t understand who my mother was. It was a different time in the 1950s. Racism and sexism were practiced unapologetically. Rebellion and resistance were not part of the American Psyche. Patriotism and conformance to the law was the mode of the day, even when that law was unjustly applied. My mother was not having any of that; she confronted and challenged the authorities and the police whenever she felt an injustice was being imposed upon her, which for the time was extremely unusual. She was often branded as a troublemaker.

In my family, the older members; my grandparents and great aunts and uncles, who regularly carried guns and often had altercations with the police, thought my mother was strange. They thought she brought unnecessary attention to herself because she fought other people’s battles. They didn’t understand and neither did I at the time, that my mother’s actions were dictated by her principles.