The charge upon you is great. We are just starting, as we celebrate the lives and deaths of great men and women… Whoever we are celebrating, it is just the beginning. You won’t be daunted if you know what you’ve already come through. The days ahead are difficult, but we are equal to this.

Maya Angelou, MLK Keynote Lecture, January 21, 2009

Since reading I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings as part of a Banned Books Week activity in high school, I have wanted to see Maya Angelou speak — and two weeks ago, I finally had my opportunity. 

She officially gave the keynote lecture for my school’s Annual MLK Week Celebration, but her speech was hardly limited to a discussion on the Civil Rights Movement. Rather, she blended song, poetry, and prose into an enchanting performance that urged each student to think and seriously address the question “where did I come from?” In doing so, she explained, we would not only learn our history but also realize “the strides made [before us] and what we are capable of” while availing ourselves of “information which informs and forms.”

More than inspirational rhetoric, though, she wove these messages into her own personal story. The most memorable anecdote came from her time in an international dance company, during a visit to Yugoslavia. Learning Serbo-Croatian just days before the trip, she met some young people in the city and traveled to a party miles away from the city. Despite initially frightening an elderly couple who had never seen a black person before, she soon befriended them, and began talking to the patriarch of the house. Curious about her heritage, he asked her the names of her ancestors, and the man, despite having never lived beyond the borders of Yugoslavia, soon promised her that he had known her great-grandfather. 

She let the audience process this for a moment, and then continued speaking:

“‘I am a human being, nothing human can be alien to me.’ – Terence, 154 BC”

– When you can internalize that, you are liberated.

This was, I believe, the message of her performance. Her familiarity with the man stemmed not from him actually knowing her great-grandfather, of course, but from a shared humanity, a sense of kinship, forged out of mutual respect and genuine interest in the other. This was the recurring theme in her songs, her poems, her stories.

What Maya Angelous says is as compelling as how she says it, because she believes so deeply in a set of principles, because her passion burns so brightly.