Maya Angelou's Inaugural Address

Maya Angelou was born on April 4th, 1928, as Marguerite Annie Johnson, in St. Louis Missouri and died on May 28, 2014, at age 86 in her home located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Maya’s parents got divorced when she was three years old, and she and her brother Bailey were sent to Stamps, Arkansas to be raised mainly by Anne Henderson, who was their grandmother. Her brother could not pronounce Marguerite because he had a stutter, and called her “My” for short, until they read a story about the Maya Indians, then he started calling her Maya and the name just stuck with her. Maya Angelou was raised during the time when people were segregated in the south. Because of this, she dealt with racism throughout her entire life. While visiting her mother one day when she was still young, Angelou was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. She was too scared to tell anyone about it, except her brother.

President Clinton personally asked Maya Angelou to compose a poem for the Inaugural Address. She recited the poem that she wrote and titled “On the Pulse of Morning”. Angelou was extremely nervous about reciting her poem, but did an amazing job of doing so. Along with the people who heard it at the actual ceremony, her poem was live broadcasted around the world for everyone to hear. The message that she delivered was: that the United States was a place where all the different elements of history can come together as one. When she was asked what the poem meant to her, Angelou said, “In my work, in everything I do, I mean to say that we human beings are more alike than we are unalike, and to use that statement to break down the walls we set between ourselves because we are different. I suggest that we should herald the differences, because the differences make us interesting, and also enrich and make us stronger. The differences are minuscule compared to the similarities. That’s what I mean to