Maya Angelou Pays Tribute to the Power of Teaching
Maya Angelou
pays touching tribute
to the power of teaching
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