Last week’s inauguration of Donald Trump, a man found liable for sexual abuse, was, among much else, an event strikingly lacking in poetry. Inaugural poems have been a key part of many recent swearing-in ceremonies; though the first such poem was recited at John F. Kennedy’s oath-taking in 1961, the modern trend began with Maya Angelou’s appearance at Bill Clinton’s 1993 inaugural. Angelou’s recitation of “On the Pulse of Morning” marked the apotheosis of a stunning career, catapulting the memoirist, essayist, actress, and singer—who was famous for writing about her own experience of sexual abuse—to generational superstardom.
Today, more than a decade after her 2014 death, Angelou occupies a unique role in our culture: she is one of its most famous and beloved figures but also one of its most consistently marginalized. Her iconic memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, sold over a million copies and remains in print. During her lifetime she regularly appeared toward the top of polls asking respondents whom they “most admired.” At the same time, Angelou is routinely reduced to an unthreatening avatar of inspirational platitudes, her work often overlooked by academics and critics even as her most quotable quips circulate endlessly.
The flattening of Angelou in the broader popular memory to greeting-card aphorisms is in part the result of her own conscious self-commodification; she literally wrote greeting cards for Hallmark, after all. But it is also emblematic of the critical impulse to turn certain writers—especially writers of color—into symbols: simple, unthreatening icons of resilience or kindness.
Angelou’s full career resists this reductive framing. She participated in the civil rights movement, serving briefly as a coordinator for Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1960. She soon became an unabashed radical, writing for the Cuban journal Revolución that same year, organizing a famous protest at the United Nations in 1961, advocating for pan-African solidarity while living in a newly liberated Ghana during the mid-1960s. Angelou returned to the United States in 1965 to assist Malcolm X in forming a new civil rights organization, a venture cut short by his assassination.
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While Angelou’s civil rights work has recently won some recognition, her significance to another emancipatory movement remains obscure. Properly viewed, Angelou must be understood as a pivotal figure of the anti-rape movement. Through her writing, Angelou deliberately sought to give voice to countless survivors of sexual assault who, like her, endured years of trauma and silence. Archival documents, including Angelou’s own recently opened papers, illustrate the profound importance of her writing to a movement then in its infancy.
Born in St. Louis in 1928, Angelou spent much of her childhood with her grandmother in small-town Arkansas, but it was during a brief return to St. Louis in the mid-1930s that her mother’s boyfriend, a man Angelou later called “Mr. Freeman,” assaulted her repeatedly.
Decades later, as Angelou—then primarily known as a performer and activist—began drafting I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she decided to write in detail about the rape. This was not an obvious choice for a first-time memoirist seeking to turn her life story into a book. Angelou later told an interviewer that she initially planned to write about her years in Africa in the 1960s. “But then, I thought, there isn’t enough written for black girls in America that says, listen, you might encounter defeats but must never be defeated.”
She told another interviewer that no day had passed when she hadn’t thought about the rape. “So I thought to myself, ‘You write so that perhaps people who hadn’t raped anybody yet might be discouraged, people who had might be informed, people who have not been raped might understand something, and people who have been raped might forgive themselves.’ That’s why I wrote about the rape.”
Angelou crafted her memoir deliberately to communicate a message of survival in spite of sexual violence. True to this commitment, Angelou’s surviving drafts show a writer striving to place the story of her assault and its aftermath at the heart of her narrative. She excised passages describing her later years, instead adding more descriptive language to the pages about the childhood assault, rounding out her imagery, making it more graphic and lyrical. “Carefully disguised in layers of narrative,” commented the critic and biographer Linda Wagner-Martin, “the rape of the character of little Marguerite takes control as the core of the autobiography.”
Notably, Angelou was writing Caged Bird in 1968 and 1969, when the “speak-out” emerged as a political tactic. In February and March of 1969, first at a New York legislative hearing and then at a church in Greenwich Village, a dozen feminist activists stood up and told stunned audiences about their abortions. Speak-outs spread across the country in 1969 and 1970, and by 1971, radical feminists in New York held a “speak-out” about their sexual assaults.
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This tactic was consonant with a novel political strategy introduced by feminist organizers: consciousness-raising. By bringing people together in groups to collectively educate, consciousness-raising allowed grassroots feminists to learn from one another. This included learning that experiences they had thought were unique were, in fact, universal. Or, in other words, the personal was political. Angelou’s memoir was itself a part of the broader movement of women speaking publicly about parts of their lives that had so long been shrouded in euphemism, secrecy, and shame.
Caged Bird hit shelves in February of 1970 to instant acclaim. It became a New York Times bestseller, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and was nominated for the National Book Award. And yet, its importance as a text of and for the anti-rape movement—a movement that emerged from second-wave feminist organizing, speak-outs, and grassroots consciousness-raising sessions in the late 1960s and early 1970s—escaped most observers.
The anti-rape movement was an organized struggle against the legal and cultural tolerance of the widespread sexual violence to which women were disproportionately subjected. During the 1970s and 1980s, this movement won legal changes, such as the passage of rape shield laws protecting the privacy of survivors of sexual violence. It also secured new resources, such as the proliferation of rape crisis centers. And it gained cultural power, exemplified by the widespread participation in Take Back the Night marches—demonstrations decrying the prevalence of gendered violence—into the present day.
Angelou’s memoir was a foundational text to many members of this movement. One winter evening in 1985, an activist from Wyoming named Lee Stanfeld drove a hundred miles to hear Angelou speak and then introduced herself to the author, asking if she might be willing to speak to a national conference of anti-rape activists and survivors of sexual assault. “I have found out, along with reading your prose and your poetry and then especially after hearing you the other night,” Stanfeld later wrote to Angelou, “that you are a human being who has opened herself up to feelings like rage and loss—but that you have managed to move beyond being angry and alone. You are a healer as well as a poet.” It was precisely that “healing” that Stanfeld wanted Angelou to impart to the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault. Angelou accepted the request and gave the keynote address to the Coalition’s seventh annual conference in Kentucky.
Four years later, an organizer with Take Back the Night invited Angelou to speak at the organization’s annual march and rally. “To most people, you are a well-known and well-respected author,” the organizer typed. “To us, and to other people who are committed to ending violence against women, you are much more.”
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Angelou was traveling during the march that year so she was forced to decline, but such correspondence exemplifies the significance of her writing to anti-rape activists and survivors of sexual assault. “I’d never heard of another Black woman, young girl, who had been raped,” recalled a sexual abuse survivor from Kosciusko, Mississippi, named Oprah Winfrey. “So I read those words and thought, ‘Somebody knows who I am.’”
Half a century later, Angelou remains a beloved figure. Yet without understanding her role as an anti-rape activist, our perceptions of her are incomplete. She wrote deliberately to empower survivors of sexual assault. Her words offered strength, vulnerability, and, above all, recognition. As survivors continue to fight against rape culture, understanding the full scope of Angelou’s activism and writing is a powerful corrective.
Scott W. Stern is the author of There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas: The Rape Trials That Sustained Jim Crow, and the People Who Fought It, from Thurgood Marshall to Maya Angelou.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
