MAYA ANGELOU: I grew up in a town in Arkansas smaller than the exposed part of this stage. And I was small and strange because I stopped talking from the time I was seven-and-a-half until I was twelve-and-a-half.

ALICE WINKLER: The cadence is unmistakable. It only takes a few words to know when you’re listening to the voice of Maya Angelou.

MAYA ANGELOU: I was known to be weird, but black Americans didn’t call me weird. People would see me in the road. My grandmother owned most of the land behind the town, most of the land the poor whites lived on, most of the land the blacks lived on, and the only black-owned store in the town. And so people had many reasons to be angry with Mama, since Mama was severe. So people disliked my grandmother.
I understand that. They’d see me in the street and say, "Mm-mm. It’s a shame Sister Henderson’s California granddaughter has gone mental."
Or "Mm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mm! Shame Sister Henderson’s California granddaughter, you know."
So they didn’t actually say I was weird, but I was pretty weird, and I understand that. However, Mama explained to me all the time, "Sister, Mama doesn’t care what these people say about you being an idiot, about you being a moron."
"Mama knows, when you and the good Lord get ready, sister, you’re going to be a preacher." I used to sit there and think, "Poor, ignorant Mama."
“I mean, really... ...I will never speak! What does she mean, preach? Oh, what a shame and disappointment Mama has in store for her.”

ALICE WINKLER: Well, she didn’t exactly become a preacher, but her mother was right. Words became her divine instrument, her poems, her memoirs, and her performances a kind of benediction. Maya Angelou, who died in 2014, was a sage and officially a national treasure. President Obama gave her the 2010 Presidential Medal of Freedom. When he introduced her, he mentioned that his own sister was named after her, and he said Angelou had risen with unbending determination and spoken to the conscience of our nation.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: By holding onto her humanity, she has inspired countless others who have known injustice and misfortune in their own lives. I won't try to say it better than Maya Angelou herself, who wrote that: "History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage, need not be lived again. Lift up your eyes upon the day breaking for you. Give birth again to the dream."

ALICE WINKLER: This is What It Takes, a podcast about passion, vision, and perseverance from the Academy of Achievement. On this episode, we mine the Academy’s vast vault of recordings to bring you Maya Angelou.

I’m Alice Winkler.

OPRAH WINFREY: "Hattie Mae, this child is gifted," and I heard that enough that I started to believe it.

ROGER BANNISTER: If you have the opportunity, not a perfect opportunity, and you don't take it, you may never have another chance.

LAURYN HILL: It all was so clear. It was just, like, the picture started to form itself.

DESMOND TUTU: There was no way in which a lie could prevail over the truth, darkness over light, death over life.

CAROL BURNETT (quoting CARRIE HAMILTON): “Every day I wake up and decide, today I'm going to love my life. Decide.”

JOHNNY CASH: My advice is, if they're going to break your leg once when you go in that place, stay out of there.

JAMES MICHENER: And then along come these differential experiences that you don't look for, you don't plan for, but boy, you’d better not miss them.

ALICE WINKLER: Maya Angelou was a member of the Academy of Achievement, and she spoke at a number of Academy events during the 1990s. During those talks, she didn’t give much detail about the traumas of her early life or, for that matter, about her extraordinary years as a writer, a performer, and a civil rights activist.
All that had been documented already very well in her seven memoirs, starting with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Instead, she talked about the lessons she’d learned from overcoming odds that were clearly stacked against her, lessons that might help others. These Academy of Achievement events were for students from around the country, and Ms. Angelou’s heart was never bigger than when she had the chance to inspire young people.
As you listen, you'll occasionally hear a question from someone in the audience, but we'll start with Maya Angelou herself, here explaining why, as a child, she suddenly fell silent.

MAYA ANGELOU: I spoke until I was seven-and-a-half. And then, at seven-and-a-half, I was raped, and the man — I told the name of the rapist to my family. He was put in jail. He was out the next day, and the next day he was found dead. And I thought that my voice had killed him, so I stopped speaking for almost six years.
I had voice, but I simply refused to use it. So I was what was called a volunteer mute. After two or three years, I forgot why I stopped speaking. I just didn’t talk, and it was the love of poetry and a mentor who drew me out of myself. She told me I loved poetry. I wrote about it. I wrote it, bad poetry, admittedly — the worst west of the Rockies — bad, bad poetry.
But I had a tablet, which I kept in my belt, and I wrote everything. Anytime anybody asked me anything, my answers were written, and this woman told me — Mrs. Flowers in Arkansas. She said, "If you really loved poetry, you would speak it." She was the one who had started me to reading it, and then she said, "Until you feel it come across your teeth, over your tongue, through your lips, you will never love poetry, so I don’t want to hear you speak. I don’t want you to tell me. I will not read anything you write."
And I wept for six months, and I mewled around and pewled around, and she kept harassing me until, finally, I went under the house with a book of poetry, and I tried to speak, and I had voice. And as you see, I’ve almost not stopped talking.

ALICE WINKLER: Maya Angelou was not the name she was born with. Her given name was Marguerite Annie Johnson. Her brother nicknamed her Maya. The rape she describes was in 1935, and the man who assaulted her was her mother’s boyfriend. It was her uncle who killed him in revenge. Years after Angelou rediscovered her voice, she won a scholarship to study dance and drama at the California Labor School. That’s also where she got her first taste for political activism. Angelou graduated at sixteen, just weeks before giving birth to a son named Guy.
She wouldn’t take money from her mother, and she wouldn’t go on welfare, so she began the life of a single mother, working as a waitress and a cook and making herself read, she says, a lot. She also spent time, it’s worth mentioning, as San Francisco’s first black female cable car conductor. Somehow, at her core, she felt she was destined for success.

MAYA ANGELOU: I did. I thought I was going to be a successful real estate broker.
I wanted to have a briefcase and wear high heel shoes and carry gloves. That was... ...really my dream. That would have made me successful, I thought, at about eighteen or nineteen.

ALICE WINKLER: The jobs she did go on to have, by the 1950s, included singing in a nightclub, acting in the European tour of Porgy and Bess, dancing with Alvin Ailey on television, and recording an album called Calypso Lady.

MUSIC: RUN JOE
Mo and Joe run the candy store
Telling fortunes behind the door
The cops grabbed Mo, and as Joe ran out
Brother Mo, he began to shout
Run Joe, hey, the Man's at the door
Run Joe, the Man, he won't let me go
Run Joe, run Joe, as fast as you can,
Run Joe, these police, holding me hand.

ALICE WINKLER: For years, she had been composing song lyrics and poems. And by the end of the 1950s, still not yet 30 years old, she moved to New York, where she joined the Harlem Writers Guild and took her place alongside James Baldwin and the other young African American writers and artists connected to the Civil Rights Movement. She appeared Off-Broadway with James Earl Jones, Lou Gossett Jr., and Cicely Tyson.
She produced and performed a cabaret for freedom with comedian Godfrey Cambridge to raise money for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Maya Angelou reveled a little in her own achievements before this audience of students, not out of a lack of humility but to show what was possible.

MAYA ANGELOU: When you know you are of worth — not asking it but knowing it — you walk into a room with a particular power. When you know you are of worth, you don't have to raise your voice. You don't have to become rude. You don't have to become vulgar. You just are, and you are like the sky is, as the air is, the same way water is wet. It doesn't have to protest.
You know, it is said that the young people have become cynical. Darlings, let me tell you something. One of the saddest things in the world is to see a cynical young person because it means that he and she have gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. It is so sad.
We need you so desperately. Not enough adults have told you, "You are all we have. Everything we've done, negative and positive, has been for you. You are all there is for us." And not enough adults tell you that, but we should tell you that every morning, while you're brushing your teeth, while you're pulling on your jeans, while you're having your breakfast, while you're on the bus, on the streetcar, on the subway. Some adult should be telling you, "Darling, you're the best we've got, and we need you."
Young men and women, it is important for you to know that you are worth it. In fact, all of your lives have already been paid for. It is imperative that you know that. Singly know it. It is wonderful to be a part of this marvelous group, but each of us is always and finally and painfully alone at certain times of our lives. And when we're young — we can never be so alone again as we are when we are young.
So in your aloneness, know that you have already been paid for — whether the ancestors came from Ireland in the 1840s, 1850, trying to escape the potato blight; whether they came from Eastern Europe, trying to escape the pogroms; whether they came from Asia in the 1850s to build a country, to build the railroads, and were not allowed legally to bring their mates for eight decades; whether they came from South America, trying to find a better place, a better land, so that they could make a better life or better lives for themselves and their progeny; whether they came from Africa, lying spoon fashion in the filthy hatches of slave ships —
They have already paid for you without any chance of ever knowing what your faces would look like, what personalities you would carry, what dreams, what magnificent breakthroughs you would make. You have already been paid for. So in your silence, in your solitude, it is imperative that you know, when you face the microscope which doesn't reveal immediately your request; when you look at the yellow pad if you’re trying to write a piece of poetry and know that all you’ve got to do is get some nouns, pronouns, a few adjectives, some adverbs, and so forth, and they won’t come together for you —
No matter what you do when you are absolutely alone, go inside yourselves, I encourage you, and understand that you have already been loved. And then, all you have to do is prepare yourselves. Always prepare yourselves so that you can go out and pay for someone who is yet to come.

STUDENT: Have you ever been mistreated because of your color? And if so, what do you think about it?

MAYA ANGELOU: Well, yes, indeed, yes. A black person grows up in this country — and in many places — knowing that racism will be as familiar as salt to the tongue, and that, also, it can be as dangerous as too much salt. I think that you agree that you must struggle for betterment for yourself and for everyone.
It is impossible to struggle for civil rights — equal rights for blacks — without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air. We all have it or none of us has it. That's the truth of it.
I was very young in that little village in Arkansas, and there was a movie house downtown. Downtown consisted of one paved street, and there was a movie house. And the girl who worked selling tickets lived on land my grandmother owned, and I knew for a fact that she and her family hadn't paid any rent for three years.
They lived behind the town on our land. I went up to get a ticket. I may have been about eight or nine. My grandmother was very religious and didn't believe in the movies, but once, she allowed me and my brother — every now and again. We went up to get a ticket, and the girl took my dime, and she wouldn't put her hand on it. I put it down. She had a cigar box, and she took a card and raked my dime into the cigar box.
Now the white kids got tickets. She took their money, and she gave them little stubs. She didn't give us anything. She just motioned, which meant that we had to go up the side steps — outside steps — and crawl through a really crummy little door and sit pitched on these three or four benches to watch the movie — and all because I was black. And I thought, "Well, I don't think I'll be going to the movies a lot." So I decided to boycott the movies.
But that was the first time I can remember, and I must have been about eight or nine. I cried a lot, and my brother, who was — well, he's always been the genius in my family. My family came closest to making a genius when they made my brother. He was a year-and-a-half older than I, and he told me they were stupid. They were ignorant. They were foolish.
It didn't really — I mean I agreed with all that because I knew he was smart; he would know. But it didn't diminish the hurt.

MS. WALLACE: And you knew it was — you did not take this personally? You knew it was because you were African American?

MAYA ANGELOU: Yes, but that's personally. Absolutely. I knew that if I was blonde and white-skinned that that wouldn't happen to me. It happened to me, Maya, who was black. There's a poem. Listen to this: it was written by Countee Cullen. It's called “Incident.”
"Once riding in old Baltimore, head filled, heart filled with glee, I saw a Baltimorean keep looking straight at me. Now I was eight and very small, and she was no whit bigger, and so I smiled, but she stuck out her tongue, and called me, ‘nigger, nigger, nigger.’ I saw the whole of Baltimore, from May until December, and of all the things that happened there, that's all that I remember."

STUDENT: My question is for Maya Angelou: Were you influenced by other African American speakers, such as Frederick Douglass?

MAYA ANGELOU: Yes, I certainly was. I love Frederick Douglass, and I teach him. I teach his work now in North Carolina, where I live, at Wake Forest University. I love the fact that Frederick Douglass said, "He who says he wants freedom, and does not want to work for it, wants the ocean without the awful roar of its mighty waters, wants to have harvest without the turning over of the soil."
So what that told me and tells all young people today is if you want freedom, you must work for it. If you want a good life, you must work for it. Don't expect anybody to give it to you. Now that doesn't mean that we don't owe you, as young people, clean streets and good housing, but you have to work, too. You must.

ALICE WINKLER: Maya Angelou's own work against racism in America took off in those heady days as an artist in Harlem, but she developed a more international perspective during her many years living in Africa as a journalist and a teacher. When she returned, she joined Martin Luther King Jr.'s movement in an official capacity. She also marched in the Women's Movement, and she advocated for marriage equality in the Gay Rights Movement.

MAYA ANGELOU: The truth is very important, no matter how negative it is. It is imperative that you learn the truth, not necessarily the facts. I mean that can come, but the facts can stand in front of the truth and almost obscure the truth. It is imperative that students learn the truth of our history. However sad, however mordant, however terrible, we must know it.
The only way out of something is all the way through it. You must see it, read it, study it, and then you can pass through it, you see. It is imperative that young white men and women study the black American history. It's imperative that blacks and whites study the Asian American history. You should know that the Asians built these railroads, that they were brought here, as Maxine Hong Kingston said, to “Gold Mountain” in the 1850s and 1840s, unable legally to bring their mates for eight decades.
It's important that you know that. Otherwise, how can you make friends? Only equals make friends. You see?
You need to know the pogroms. You need to know what happened in Russia and in Poland and in that area. You must know it because you are living next door to, being taught by, or going to teach or marry somebody who is a descendant from that group of people. You need to know it. Don't hesitate to learn the most painful aspect of our history.
My heart is so heavy when I see the reality of the Indian reservation. And as an American, I know I'm, too, responsible. I am an Indian. I am everything. And so, at once, I feel for the poverty and take great delight in the woman who says, "I want to raise my children in the traditional way so that they will love the earth."
I see us in the most complex, enigmatic puzzle, which, of course, is life. The need we have to see ourselves in each other and admit what we see is so great. The Native American will only be able to break that cycle when the larger society says, "These people are Americans and deserve everything all Americans have."
The black American will only be able to break this cycle of poverty and violence and child abuse and early death through drugs when the larger society and the African Americans say, "I and they deserve everything, everything good." And until we do that, we are putting Band-Aids on somebody's throat which has just been cut.
I hope these young men and women will take this moment to try to talk together. Many of you can hardly articulate what you really feel, and yet your hearts are full. Talk. Use the language, men. Use the language, women. That is the only thing which really separates us from the rats and the rhinoceros.
It is so that — the ability to say how we feel. "I believe this. I need this." Start to talk. Please. Well, you know, I love you, and I am really overcome.

CALLER: Hi, Dr. Angelou. I was wondering...

MAYA ANGELOU: Good morning.

CALLER: ...as a black woman, is there any one scripture or poem or saying that has been able to sustain you in moments of challenges or adversities or difficulties?

MAYA ANGELOU: Well, yes. Some of them are mine, of course — “And Still I Rise,” which is a poem of mine that is very popular in the country, and a number of people use it. A lot of black people and a lot of white people use it — which, it begins, "You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lies. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I'll rise."
So there is that poem, and it goes on, and then a poem just for women, which is called “Phenomenal Woman,” and I love the poem. I wrote it for black women and white women and Chinese women and Japanese women and Jewish women. I wrote it for Native American women, Aleut, Eskimo ladies. I wrote it for all women, very fat women, very thin, pretty, plain.
It says, "Many people wonder where my secret lies.
I'm not cute or built to suit a fashion model's size. When I try to show them, they think I'm telling lies. I say, ‘It's in the reach of my arms, the span of my hips, the stride of my step, the curl of my lips. I'm a woman, phenomenally.’"

CALLER: Would you consider running for political office? Because I feel your talents are being wasted if you're not helping our country in a politic form.

MAYA ANGELOU: Thank you very much for the statement. I still have not realized my talents. I believe that each of us comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. So at this wonderful, young age of 65, I don't know yet what the Lord has for me to do. I try to live up to the energy and to the calling. But I wouldn't dare say I have even scratched the surface yet.
As for political office, I am not qualified, really. I am an artist. I am a poet.

ALICE WINKLER: But as a poet, Maya Angelou was honored at the highest levels of American politics, not just by President Obama when he gave her the Medal of Freedom, but also by President Ford, who appointed her to the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission, and by President Carter, who invited her to serve on the Presidential Commission for the International Year of the Woman.
And then there was President Clinton, who asked her to write a poem for his first inauguration in 1993. It was only the second time a poet had ever taken part in a presidential inauguration. The first was Robert Frost, reading at John F. Kennedy's. Angelou's poem for the occasion, “On the Pulse of Morning,” wasn't a favorite of literary critics, but it wowed the public, and it brought Maya Angelou broader and even greater renown.
Here she is reciting it in her navy blue cloth coat on the dais, with Bill Clinton glowing behind her. It's six minutes long, so I'll just play you the end.

MAYA ANGELOU: “Lift up your eyes upon this day breaking for you. Give birth again to the dream. Women, children, men, take it into the palms of your hands. Mold it into the shape of your most private need. Sculpt it into the image of your most public self. Lift up your hearts. Each new hour holds new chances for new beginnings. Do not be wedded forever to fear, yoked eternally to brutishness.”
“The horizon leans forward, offering you space to place new steps of change. Here, on the pulse of this fine day, you may have the courage to look up and out and upon me, the Rock, the River, the Tree, your country. No less to Midas than the mendicant. No less to you now than the mastodon then. Here, on the pulse of this new day, you may have the grace to look up and out and into your sister's eyes and into your brother's face, your country, and say simply, very simply, with hope, ‘Good morning.’”

ALICE WINKLER: Maya Angelou was feeling optimism that cold January morning in 1993, but then again, part of what was so stirring about listening to her voice was the quiet sense of power and righteousness and love she always spoke with. She was not naïve. She had endured some of the worst in her own life and in the life of our country, and she had come out the other side.
For the next 20 years, until her death at 86, she kept writing, kept teaching, kept speaking. She inspired another generation of poets, too, including a lot of the biggest names in hip-hop and R&B, who felt a kinship with her message and the rhythm of her speech. And even through the infirmities of her old age, Maya Angelou kept fighting for the dignity and equality of humanity, all of it.
When she was asked during this Academy of Achievement event whether she had hope that that would be achieved in her lifetime, this is how she answered.

MAYA ANGELOU: Well, we have to want it. I don't mean say we want it. I don't mean like it. But we have to need it, understand that we need it. There's a Zen story about a man who studied with a master — or mistress — for a while, and told the master, "I want the truth." And the master said, "All right." And he lived with him, and he sent him out, and he cut trees. He said, "Now, cut trees for a while."
So the fellow cut trees for about six or eight months, and he finally said to the master, "I've been asking you for the truth." He said, "Oh, that's right." He said, "You haven't told me anything." He said, "That's right." So he said, "Now, go out and turn all those trees into charcoal." So he did that for about six months, and the man never spoke to him. Finally, at the end, he said, "Listen, Master, I'm leaving you. I told you I wanted the truth." The master said, "Let me walk with you a way."
He walked with him until they came over a bridge. Under, there was rushing water. The master gave him a shove. He went over. The guy went down once. He said, "I can't swim!" Down again, "I can't swim!" The third time, the master pulled him up onto the side and said, "Now, when you want truth the same way you wanted that breath of air, you've already got it."

ALICE WINKLER: Truth-teller, writer, professor, poet, and performer, Maya Angelou.

MUSIC: CALYPSO BLUES

ALICE WINKLER: The recordings you heard in this episode were made in 1991, '94, and '97 by the Academy of Achievement. Our next episode will also feature Ms. Angelou. We could listen to her forever. She'll be paying tribute to her friend Martin Luther King Jr. and his legacy. That episode will be released in two weeks in time for the 30th observance of the MLK holiday. I'm Alice Winkler, and this is What It Takes from the Academy of Achievement. Thanks to the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation for funding What It Takes, and thanks to you for listening.

ALICE WINKLER: A decade before Maya Angelou published her first and now classic book, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, she was a civil rights activist and a friend of Martin Luther King Jr.

MAYA ANGELOU: The dream of Martin Luther King, for me, represents the best the human being can hope for: a world of peace, of development, a world of respect, a world where all men and women are valued, none higher than the other, none lower than the other because of his or her color or his or her race or his or her religion or cultural persuasion. That is the best we can hope for. I think this is the dream of America.

ALICE WINKLER: In the last episode of What It Takes, we heard Maya Angelou talk to students about the lessons she'd learned over the course of her life, lessons about resilience and joy that sprang from her childhood trauma and from living in the Jim Crow South. In this episode, as we approach the 30th observance of the MLK national holiday, we'll hear Angelou talk about what she learned from Dr. King.
This is What It Takes, a podcast about passion, vision, and perseverance from the Academy of Achievement. I'm Alice Winkler.

OPRAH WINFREY: "Hattie Mae, this child is gifted," and I heard that enough that I started to believe it.

ROGER BANNISTER: If you have the opportunity, not a perfect opportunity, and you don\t take it, you may never have another chance.

LAURYN HILL: It all was so clear. It was just, like, the picture started to form itself.

DESMOND TUTU: There was no way in which a lie could prevail over the truth, darkness over light, death over life.

CAROL BURNETT (quoting CARRIE HAMILTON): “Every day I wake up and decide, today I'm going to love my life. Decide.”

JOHNNY CASH: My advice is, if they're going to break your leg once when you go in that place, stay out of there.

JAMES MICHENER: And then along come these differential experiences that you don't look for, you don't plan for, but boy, you’d better not miss them.

ALICE WINKLER: Maya Angelou, who died in 2014, was a writer, a poet, an actress, and a professor. She was also a member of the Academy of Achievement, and in the 1990s, she spoke at several of the Academy's Martin Luther King Day events held for students around the country. So here are excerpts of Dr. Angelou, as well as the voices of young people eager to soak in her wisdom, her spirit, and the unforgettable sound of her voice.

MAYA ANGELOU: Dr. King was a human being. It is very dangerous to make a person larger than life because then young men and women are tempted to believe, "Well, if he was that great, he's inaccessible, and I can never try to be that or emulate that or achieve that." The truth is, Martin Luther King was a human being with a brilliant mind, a powerful heart, and insight and courage, and also with a sense of humor. So he was accessible.
I mentioned courage, and I would like to say something else about that, finding courage in the leaders and in you who will become leaders. Courage is the most important of all the virtues because, without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You see? You can't be consistently kind or fair or humane or generous, not without courage, because if you don't have it, sooner or later, you'll stop and say, "Eh, the threat is too much. The difficulty is too high. The challenge is too great."

ALICE WINKLER: Maya Angelou heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak in person for the first time in 1960. It was the year of the Greensboro sit-ins and the year Ruby Bridges, with four federal marshals, walked into the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. Maya Angelou had come to New York the year before as a successful singer and dancer and a single mother of 31 in order to focus on her writing.
She had joined the Harlem Writers Guild, and it was in Harlem that she and her good friend comedian Godfrey Cambridge went to see Dr. King. She described that pivotal day in her life in her memoir The Heart of a Woman. Here's a bit of it from the audiobook version.

MAYA ANGELOU: “The listeners didn't move. There was a yawping expectancy under the stillness. He was here, our own man, black, intelligent, and fearless. The introduction was over, and Martin Luther King Jr. rose. The audience collectively lost its composure. Pews scraped against the floor as people stood, rearing back, pushing, leaning forward, shouting, ‘Yes, Lord! Come on, Dr. King! Just come on!’”
“Martin Luther King walked to a position behind the podium. He raised both hands. It was at once a surrendering and a quelling gesture. The church became quiet, but the people remained standing. They were trying to fill their eyes with the sight of the man. He smiled warmly and lowered his arms. The audience sat immediately, as if they had been attached by invisible strings to the ends of his fingers.”
“He began to speak in a rich, sonorous voice. He brought greetings from our brothers and sisters in Atlanta and in Montgomery, in Charlotte and Raleigh, Jackson and Jacksonville. ‘A lot of you,’ he reminded us, ‘are from the South and still have ties to the land.’ He said the South we might remember is gone. There was a new South, a more violent and ugly South, a country where our white brothers and sisters were terrified of change, inevitable change.”
“They would rather scratch up the land with bloody fingers and take their most precious document, the Declaration of Independence, and throw it into the deepest ocean, bury it under the highest mountain, or burn it in the most flagrant blaze than admit justice into a seat at the welcome table and fair-play room in a vacant inn.”

ALICE WINKLER: When she and Godfrey Cambridge left, they knew they had to do something. They agreed that they had the talent and connections to put on a show to raise money for the cause. They recruited their friends in the entertainment world, and they asked the owner of the famous jazz club The Village Gate whether they could use the venue. The show was called the Cabaret for Freedom, and its success led to her becoming the Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Angelou only held the job for six months before she moved overseas. I'll get to that story in a bit. But it secured her place as a member of the inner circle of the Civil Rights Movement.

MAYA ANGELOU: Dr. King was not only a deep and profound man — I mean a great thinker and a great philosopher and a great religious person — but he was also very funny. Unfortunately, a number of people who speak of him never mention his humor, and so, somehow, they put him beyond the reach of young men like you. He had a wonderful sense of humor, so he took himself seriously by being always aware that in order to live, you must be able to laugh or you become so dour and heavy, and you act as if you've put airplane glue on the back of your hand and stuck it to your forehead, you know.
And walk around, "I'm serious." Well, that was never Dr. King. So that fact that he had enough courage to enjoy humor is with me today.

ALICE WINKLER: Maya Angelou said she tried to emulate some of Dr. King's other qualities, too.

MAYA ANGELOU: I don't think modesty is a very good virtue if it is a virtue at all. A modest person will drop the modesty in a minute. You see, it's a learned affectation, but humility comes from inside out. Humility says there was someone before me, someone found the path, someone made the road before me, and I have the responsibility of making the road for someone who is yet to come.
Dr. King was really humble so that he was accessible to everybody. The smallest child could come up to him. The most powerful person could come up to him. He never changed. You know, I mean if somebody very rich and very powerful said, "Dr. King, I want to speak to you," he was the same person to that person as he would be to one of you who is 16, 17, who would say, "Dr. King?" He was still accessible, gentle, powerful, humble.
Dr. King was profoundly intelligent. That is to say, he was able to see, to examine, to analyze, to evaluate, to measure the climate of the times, the expediency of his calling, of his ministry. That's intelligence. Now intellect, of course, helped him to be able to explain what he saw with grace and eloquence and wonderful quotations, whether from Paul Laurence Dunbar or Longfellow.

ALICE WINKLER: And of course, it helped him become one of the greatest orators to ever live.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American Dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

MAYA ANGELOU: The music of the “I Have a Dream” speech is a replication of the music which comes out of the mouths of the African American preacher — preacher, singer, blues singer, jazz singer, rap person. It's so catching, so hypnotic, so wonderful that, as a poet, I continue to try to catch it, to catch the music.
And if I can catch the music and have the content as well, then I have the ear of the public. And I know that that's what Martin Luther King was able to do, not just in the “I Have a Dream” speech, although that has become a kind of poem which is used around the world, but in everything he said. There was the black, Southern, Baptist or Methodist preacher singing his song, telling our story. Not just black American story either, but telling the human story, and I mean that — if, as a poet, I can replicate that, then “I'm okay, Jack!”

ALICE WINKLER: Maya Angelou listened to King deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech from Ghana, where she was living in 1963, and here's what happened. Right around the time she started working for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in New York, she fell in love with a South African freedom fighter, married him, and followed him to Egypt. In Cairo, she worked as editor of the English-language paper The Arab Observer, covering the anti-colonial struggles in Africa. But Angelou's marriage didn't last long, and she ended up moving to Ghana, where her son was in college.
She became part of the tight-knit exile community there, which included W.E.B. Du Bois. Ghana is also where Maya Angelou got to know Malcolm X when he came to speak. The two became fast friends, and she started helping him plan for an organization of Afro-American unity, but by the mid-1960s, when she returned to the United States, he'd been assassinated.

MASANI GILLIAM: In your opinion, what were the differences and similarities between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King?

MAYA ANGELOU: Now first, what is your name?

MASANI GILLIAM: Masani.

MAYA ANGELOU: Masani what?

MASANI GILLIAM: Gilliam.

MAYA ANGELOU: Ah-ha. At first, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were much more alike than they were unalike. Their methods of achieving the ends were different. Martin Luther King had been influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and the concept of nonviolent struggle.
Malcolm X had been influenced by the head of the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad, and, of course, had lived a different life, too, had lived in the streets and in prison. So his modus operandi was a different one than Martin Luther King’s, but essentially, at heart, they were very much alike. They wanted the best for their people.
Now, Malcolm said for his people, but he changed, too. And if you read the Autobiography of Malcolm X by Mr. Haley, you will see, toward the end of the book, where I am mentioned in the book — because Mr. Malcolm X came to Africa, and I was able, along with others, to help him to meet all of the Africans of power in Ghana at the time.
He said that he was coming back to the United States to say that he no longer believed that all whites were blue-eyed devils, that just being born white did not make a person evil. Now that took a lot of courage because he had said so, so many times, and so eloquently and with so much passion. But he changed, so that when he changed, he became, again, more in line with Martin Luther King than he had shown earlier. They were very much alike.

ALICE WINKLER: When Maya Angelou came back to the U.S., she reconnected with the Civil Rights Movement, which was, by then, focused on economic justice as well as racial equality. Dr. King asked Angelou if she'd tour the country with him to promote his Poor People’s Campaign. She was excited to help but asked to wait until after her 40th birthday, which was coming up on April 4, 1968. It turned out to be the very day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
Maya Angelou got the news as she was cooking a feast for her friends. She did not celebrate her birthday again for many years. She doubled her commitment to writing. The next year, she published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, her now-famous memoir about growing up as a black girl in racist America. And for the rest of her life, she remained dedicated to the work and the spirit of Martin Luther King.

MAYA ANGELOU: He cared about women. He cared about the poor. He cared about the Spanish-speaking. He cared about Jews. He cared about poor whites, the miners, and those who were having a very hard time. So that even as he was assassinated, he was planning a march on Washington called the Poor People's March, in which he had encouraged African Americans, white Americans, Spanish-speaking, Native Americans, Asian-Americans, all of us, to join and go to Washington and sit there in various tent cities in the nation's capital until something was done for the poor.

STUDENT: Do you think there will be any other great people like Martin Luther King in the near future — and who?

MAYA ANGELOU: Yes. Thank you, darling. Where are you from? Where are you calling from?

STUDENT: Gunston Elementary School in Lorton, Virginia.

MAYA ANGELOU: Okay. Thank you. Yes. I don't think that the world ended, as tragic as it was when Reverend King was assassinated. Young men and women are preparing themselves now for the burden and the glory of being great, and you can't say where the person will come from. She may be growing up in a condominium in Hilton Head, or he may be growing up in a log cabin in Charlotte, North Carolina, or in Virginia, where you are.
He may be Asian. He may be white. He may be black. She may be Native American. She may be Spanish-speaking. She may be blonde. She may be black-skinned. She'll be an American. That'll be hot, yes? She'll be an American, trying to live at the highest level. So don't become disheartened. Just create yourself. Have enough courage to invent yourself.

ALICE WINKLER: Just to remind you, this was Maya Angelou participating in an Academy of Achievement event for MLK Day in the mid-1990s. The election of the first African American president was still a good way in the future. The moderator that day asked Maya Angelou what she thought Dr. King would have to say about the state of the African American community, of the high rate of incarceration and black-on-black violence in the inner city.

MAYA ANGELOU: Let me say that not only would Dr. King be disappointed and hurt, but I would imagine so would Malcolm X, and so would W.E.B. Du Bois, and so would Marcus Garvey. Carter G. Woodson would be terribly disappointed, A. Philip Randolph and Adam Clayton Powell — the black men who tried to leave ideals that were palpable, that were tenable, that one could almost touch. These men would be terribly disappointed because they meant to leave ideals for young black men to emulate, to not imitate so much as to appreciate.
It's very hard, you see, for anybody to get beyond the propaganda which is dumped on his or her head. If a person — any human being — is told often enough, "You are nothing. You are nothing. You account for nothing. You count for nothing. You are less than a human being. I have no visibility of you. You are nothing" — if any person is told that often enough, the person finally begins to believe it.
And not only believe it but to say, "You think I'm nothing? I will show you where nothing is," and becomes even lower than he or she is accused of being. It is very, very hard for a young black man anywhere to sit in his home — in his home, in his place of living, in the street sometimes — and believe that this country cares about him. It is very hard.
So if the country doesn't care, if his peers are going down the hole, then he says, "Well, they look just like me. They're nothing. So that proves I'm nothing. In that case, their lives are worth nothing, and I can not only take their lives, I can allow them to take mine."

ALICE WINKLER: And people who are not treated with respect, who are not valued, she said in answer to another question from a student in the audience, cannot develop character.

MAYA ANGELOU: Oh, I know that is true. People will very often try to respond to you on the level on which you address them. So if you say, "Aren't you wonderful? Aren't you splendid? My goodness, you're beautiful. Oh, you're so bright" — people will try — even if they're not, they really will try to lift themselves up to that. On the other hand, if you say, "You know, you're a dog. You really are so low. You'll never be anybody. In fact, you're a nobody now and you never have been," sooner or later that person will respond on the level on which he or she is addressed.
He will say figuratively or literally, "Let me show you where ‘dog’ is. Let me show you where low really is. I will show you that." And this young woman, who's just spoken, has told one of the most basic truths. The ways in which we — the levels on which we approach young people, they will more often than not respond on those levels. Let me tell you a story about someone who is known by many of these young men and women.
Years ago, I did a movie called Poetic Justice, and there was a young man the first day who cursed so, I couldn’t believe it. I walked around behind him and tried to ignore him, but the second day he and another young man, black man, ran to each other, and they were about to fight, and hundreds of extras started to run away. But one black man walked up to the two young men, and I walked up, and I took one by his shoulder.
I said, "Let me speak to you." He said, "(GARBLED WORDS)." I said, "Let me speak to you, honey."
"Yeah, well, I'll tell you something. (GARBLED WORDS)." I said, "No, let me talk to you, please," and he finally calmed down. And I said, "Do you know how much you're needed? Do you know what you mean to us? Do you know that hundreds of years of struggle have been for you? You? Please, baby. Take a minute. Don't lose your life on a zoom." I put my arm around him.
He started to weep. The tears came down. That was Tupac Shakur. I took him — I walked him down into a little gully and kept his back to the people so they wouldn't see him, and I used my hands to dry his cheeks, and I kept talking to him sweetly. Sweetly. For the next week, while I was on that film, whenever I walked by, he would be saying, "So I told these — " He would say, "Good morning, Miss Angelou."
You see? The young woman has hit upon something, probably the most profound that I have heard in this day, that people will respond, and you must start them young so that these young men and women — dears, try to introduce courtesy into your speech to each other. You have no idea what it will do for your brother or sister to whom you speak, and you surely have no idea what it will do for you.
It will lift you up. I know there are blacks who say, "I can use the N-word because I mean it endearingly." I don't believe that. I believe it is vulgar and dangerous given from any mouth to any ear. I know that if poison is in a vile which says P-O-I-S-O-N and has a skull and the crossbones, that it's poison, but if you pour the same thing into Bavarian crystal, it is still poison.

ALICE WINKLER: Maya Angelou told this story about Tupac Shakur, the legendary rapper, before he was killed in a drive-by shooting. His 1999 album, released after his death, featured a song inspired by Maya Angelou's poem “Still I Rise,” and in fact, that's the title of the album. It has plenty of the kind of language that Maya Angelou did not approve of, so I'll only play a bit that she would have.

MUSIC: STILL I RISE
I was born not to make it but I did
The tribulations of a ghetto kid, still I rise
Still I (still I) I rise (I rise)
Please give me to the sky (the sky)
And if (and if) I die (I die)
I don't want you to cry
I stay sharp as always
Running your bricks with blitz
Through your project hallways

ALICE WINKLER: Tupac Shakur was just one of the many rap, hip-hop, and R&B artists who befriended Maya Angelou or was influenced by the rhythm of her speech and the power of her words. Kanye West, Queen Latifah, The Roots, Nicki Minaj, Q-Tip, Common, Kendrick Lamar, Alicia Keys, and many others likewise revered her as a wise elder. And whether they knew it or not, they were inheriting from her the courage, passion, and poetry of Martin Luther King Jr.
At each of these MLK Day events where Maya Angelou spoke, there was always a student who wanted to know whether his dream had come true. Here is how she answered.

MAYA ANGELOU: I don't know if we have really realized the dream yet. With the recent escalation of hate and violence and racism, I don't think it's fair to say that the dream has been realized. I think what we are obliged to do, rather, is continue to remember the dream and continue to tell the children, all our children, that this is what has been dreamed for them.
I think it is imperative that we take small black children and small white children and small Spanish-speaking children and small Asian children — take them into our laps, take them into our classrooms, take them into our homes, into the churches and synagogues and temples and mosques — and tell them that this is their country. It belongs to everyone equally. This is important.
Tell them that they have already been paid for. It is very important for them to know that so that they can feel, "Oh, the welfare of this country depends upon me thinking, and thinking deeply, and thinking correctly, and thinking fairly." We have to work at it. It's not something we can sit back and say, "Whew! It's coming round the mountain."
No, no. We have to go out and put our hands on it and build it, flesh it out, make it real. We have to do that. He dreamed the dream. It is up to us who are left here to make it come true.
The statement is: “In evil times, the only place for a moral person is on the ramparts, in jail, or in exile.” And so, certainly, when other human beings' rights are being denied, Dr. King — and I would add Malcolm X, and I would add Medgar Evers, and certainly some of the most activist — Fannie Lou Hamer and others — would be marching or whatever would be effective at this time. Marching might not be the thing.
There might be a necessity to devise a new and other way to deal with inequities in our society.
For you see, young men and women, the charge upon you is no small matter. It really is — no matter what field you’re interested in, no matter what discipline catches your fancy and your intelligence — the real problem, the real charge upon you is to make this country more than it is today, more than what James Baldwin called "these yet-to-be United States."
That is the charge. If you go through a microscope to find it, wonderful; a set of drums to find it, marvelous; a platform where you will be teaching at the university or in kindergarten, marvelous. Whatever you do, remember, since life is our most precious gift, and since — as far as we can be absolutely certain — it is given to us to live but once, let us so live we will not regret years of useless virtue and inertia and blithering ignorance.
And in dying, each of us can say, "All my conscious life and energies have been dedicated to the most noble cause in the world, the liberation of the human mind and spirit, beginning with my own." Thank you.

ALICE WINKLER: Civil rights activist, poet, and writer Maya Angelou. She spoke about the legacy and lessons of her friend Martin Luther King Jr. for the Academy of Achievement in 1991, '94, and '97. Dr. Angelou died in 2014 at the age of 86. And just a reminder, this is our second episode about Maya Angelou, so if you missed the first, please go take a listen. And spread the word: our Twitter handle is #WhatItTakesNow.
This is What It Takes from the Academy of Achievement. I'm Alice Winkler.
Funding for What It Takes comes from the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation. We thank them, and we thank you, as always, for listening.