All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes: An Autobiography

by Maya Angelou

obscene patience of certain victors.

Had I been less timid, I would have cursed God. Had I come from a different background, I would have gone further and denied His very existence. Having neither the courage nor the historical precedent, I raged inside myself like a blinded bull in a metal stall.

Of course I meant it in theory, in conversation

sometimes you have to defend yourself from yourself.”

old American movies which tacked on Black characters as awkwardly as the blinded attach paper tails to donkey caricatures.

Were we only and vainly trying to kill that portion of our history which we could neither accept nor deny?

They didn’t want to know that they had not come home, but had left one familiar place of painful memory for another strange place with none.

All people use food for more reasons than mere nutrition,

An outdooring is the first African rite of passage. It always begins at dawn, eight days after the child’s birth, and gives family and friends a chance to see and welcome the newest soul.

agitation becomes a bore after a while.”

not to the agitators.”

American Negroes are fed up with the system because Democracy does not work. They feel that they are proof.”

“Democracy was never created for the lower classes.

not only uneducated, I thought he was stupid as well.