Smashing Ones Dreams
Marguerite Johnson, the young Missouri native, moved with her family to the small town of Stamps, Arkansas where she grew up in a town of poverty and pain. After her fist marriage, Marguerite changed her name to Maya. Maya Angelou was commended by her peers for being an impressive Renaissance woman and for having a beautiful voice of modern black literature. Angelou was known for her work in the Arts, Television, and Literature. In "Graduation," an excerpt taken from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou describes the racial discrimination that was occurring to her and the African American community in which she grew up. Maya Angelou, along with her graduating class, and the black and white communities, experienced the never ending tragedy of hate and discrimination amongst their fellow Americans during the 1940s which caused the black communities to feel unwanted and unappreciable.
After the High School graduation ceremony, only a few African American students would attend college due to the lack of education, financial stability, and the simple fact that the white men did not want African American men and women to attend. Their futures were already chosen for them; African Americans could be "carpenters, farmers, handymen, masons, maids, cooks and baby nurses" (Angelou, 789). As dictated by the white Americans, the African Americans knew this was what their future consisted of. They felt there were no other opportunities for them in life. At that time, blacks felt they had a limited amount of choices to choose from, so they went along with what the white men said. African Americans knew they too had the brain power to conquer the world, but they feared to do so. Blacks were told by the white males that they could never be like "Galileo, Curie, and Edison" (Angelou, 794) because they were not smart enough. The young African American children were told they should become athletes like four-time gold medalist Jesse Owens, and the...
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