Maya Angelou is a civil rights activist from Long Beach, California, the urban Northern part of the country. In addition, she wrote seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry. I read a context from one of her well-known autobiography called “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”. The book tells us what the history did not tell us: about her life and the disadvantages the society forced the blacks to have at that time. The book implicitly throws us a question about human rights.
When she was young, the things with her parents were not turning out right, so her parents decided to turn their children back to grandma and grandpa. That meant letting the children travel from North to South on their own when they were three and four years old. There was a porter with them, but his job was only taking them to the train safely. Then the children had to travel the whole way without any adults. The problem was, there were a lot of families doing exactly the same thing. Apparently, the people who saw the children traveling by themselves were not shocked. What the children saw while they lived with their grandparents is black slavery. They saw poor and weak black men doing excessive hard labors, but their wages could not even get them out of debt to the shop owner. No matter how long they worked, it was always not enough.
Most of the people who live in the 21st century does not know anything about these things. This is one of the many stories the history did not tell us or refused to tell. I agree that history cannot hold every small single detail of what happened in the past. However, not revealing the truth because it is so ashaming and disadvantaging is a very wrong thing to do. Even if it is an embarrassing fact for the past leading society, it can be important and valuable to past minority people. Some facts might have been hurtful and embarrassing to some people, but they could have wanted to share it out to make things fair and stop it before it continues again. The small stories that have not been shared out does not mean they are not valuable.
