Maya Angelou

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, is of great value to not only myself, but to society as a whole. By portraying her own life through the book, she is able to convey the difficulties associated with the mixture of racial and gender discrimination dealt with by young, Southern black girls. At the same time, she touches on subjects from child abuse to the search for one's purpose in life.
Maya wastes no time plunging into the controversy of racial discrimination within the first few pages of her book. As a child, Maya feels an intense sense of displacement as a black girl and when her "Momma" sews her a new Sunday dress, Maya believes this will be her chance to fit in with the genteel, white girls. When the dress is finished, Maya believes it is nothing more than a "white womans throw-away" and she is forced to conclude that she will always be an ugly black child who could never measure up to the pretty white girls. The racist society that existed around Maya as a ...