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Maya Angelou used poetry, song, dance and storytelling Thursday (October 29, 1998) to pay a touching tribute to the power and influence of teaching.
Drawing on her personal experiences, Angelou told how the people who believed in her have been the people who have taught her, touched her and helped her become the teacher she is today.
Angelou, a renowned author and poet, spoke to about 6,000 people at the WEAC Convention.
She told about her grandmother, who taught her to read at an early age and reached down deep inside of her to help her discover her potential. She told of her disabled Uncle Willy, who taught her multiplication tables at an early age.
She sang a song she wrote about Willy who, she said, was "crippled, black, poor during the lynching years." Yet, she said, "I have no idea of the extent of his power, the range of his influence" as a teacher.
Angelou, who currently is a professor at Wake Forest University, said her heart now is in teaching.
"I know if I had taught before I had written a book, I never would have written a book," she said. "I love it so much."
Angelou said she was sexually assaulted as a child. She said she reported the rapist, who was jailed for one day and then was kicked to death two days later.
"It so traumatized me that I stopped speaking," she said. "I thought my voice had killed the man and that if I spoke my voice might just go out and kill anybody. So I stopped speaking for six years."
Her grandmother, she said, gave her support. She quoted her grandmother as telling her: "Momma don't care what people say about you, that you must be a moron or an idiot because you can't talk. Momma don't care. Momma know when you and the good Lord get ready, sister, you going to be a teacher."
"I think back on Momma," Angelou said. "Momma dared to teach me. Momma didn't accept how I appeared. This is the value of the teacher, who looks at a face and says there's something behind that and I want to reach that person, I want to influence that person, I want to encourage that person, I want to enrich, I want to call out that person who is behind that face, behind that color, behind that language, behind that tradition, behind that culture. I believe you can do it. I know what was done for me."
Angelou said she developed a love of reading at an early age and found herself captivated by poetry. In particular, she said, she loved reading Shakespeare so much that she felt he had written specifically for her.
"At about 11, I was so certain that Shakespeare was a black girl who had been molested" that she memorized much of his work.
"I think that we take too lightly and sometimes for granted our position as composers." The influence of teachers, she said, is even greater than "the most broad, the most wide, the deepest, the most profound influence you can imagine."
"Later, people who will not remember your name are changed, influenced, straightened up, made healthy, healed in some cases" as a result of your influence.
Recalling how a classroom teacher once took extra time to teach her, Angelou said: "I encourage you every way I can to see the range of your influence. Somebody in your class could very well be the next teacher. Somebody in your class may be the next Maya Angelou or Rosa Parks. Somebody in your class might actually be Hillary Rodham Clinton. ...
"Somewhere there's a boy or a girl who's going to someday help us ... rid ourselves of this plague of AIDS and cancer. Somebody is going to help us rid ourselves of this blight of racism and sexism. She's in school somewhere. He's in school somewhere. And you might be his teacher."
Posted October 29, 1998