Maya Angelou was a widely regarded author and poet, known for her work in the civil rights movement and affiliation with both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.Angelou is championed as overcoming significant life obstetrical, which she detailed in a series of seven autobiographies beginning with "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings".With an impressive list of supporters including Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey and many more, what is the truth about America's favorite poetic moralist?
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
This is the truth about Maya Angelou, the American poetess who died recently and had, well, I guess we could say a fairly storied life that largely seems to have been glossed over by the media, so I think it's worth having a look at who we consider our heroes and heroines these days.
Margaret Ann Johnson was her original name.
She was born April the 4th, 1928, in St.
Louis, Missouri.
Her parents divorced when she was three years old, and she was sent along with her four-year-old brother to stay with their paternal grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas.
Both children, Maya and I guess then Marguerite and her brother, were placed on a train with only tags on their wrists that read, to whom it may concern with their names and destinations.
So some rough travel for little kids.
I mean, imagine these days sending a three- and four-year-old on a long train journey with just a wrist stamp.
Their grandmother, whom the children called Mama, lived at the back of a general store with her son Willie, who was Marguerite's uncle.
Uncle Willie had been dropped by a babysitter as an infant and was left physically handicapped.
There, Marguerite and her brother absorbed the strict religious and moral training highlighted by frequent lashes with a switch from a peach tree.
And as I mentioned last year in my video about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, Physical abuse within the black community remains at tragically high levels and is one of the things that the black community can do to further advance their children and make sure that they grow up as smart and as socially skilled as possible.
But it still remains somewhat unaddressed within the black community.
I hope that I could remind this community to focus on that.
The children did not hear from either of their parents until three years later, when they received a few unexpected gifts which brought up a great deal of emotion and questions.
Why was she sent away?
She thought, did she do something wrong?
Was it her fault?
Marguerite described struggling with these questions all throughout her childhood.
One year later, when she was seven years old, her biological father arrived without warning and said he was taking the children back with him Marguerite described a feeling of sadness and panic over the news, aware that she may never see the lady she called Mama again, and not knowing what to expect from the biological mother she hadn't seen, In over four years.
This kind of childhood is a recipe for all of the disasters to come.
Without a significant culture of introspection, self-reflection, the Socratic pursuit of self-knowledge, then these disasters are almost certain to replicate like a blind, broken, rabid photocopier of trauma.
When Marguerite first saw her mother, Vivian Baxter, she was awestruck by her physical beauty.
She went on to believe that her mother was too beautiful to watch after children.
And this is why she was sent away.
She recalls her mother saying, Baby, wait a minute.
I think you're the greatest woman I've ever met.
And Marguerite thought, Suppose she's right.
Suppose I'm going to be somebody.
Goodness.
Marguerite's mother drank and danced in gambling halls while they took residence in an incredibly rough area of St.
Louis where gambling and bootlegging was prevalent.
This, of course, was during Prohibition.
This made for a very rough transition with her brother developing a stutter and Marguerite's nights often going sleepless due to her nightmares.
Six months after the move, Vivian Baxter moved in with her boyfriend, whose name was Mr.
Freeman, And brought along the children.
I'm sorry to say, what comes next?
Marguerite would often crawl into bed with both her mother and Mr.
Freeman due to the aforementioned nightmares and difficulty sleeping.
So, this is not the biological father, and tragically, when single mothers shack up with non-biological fathers, the children are 20 or 30 times more likely to be abused.
One morning when the rest of the family was absent, Freeman raped eight-year-old Margaret and threatened to kill her brother if she told anybody about the crime.
So this was the man that her mother invited into her children's lives and invited her children into bed with.
As you can imagine, Margaret suffered terrible physical pain after being raped by an adult at the age of eight, was barely able to walk for several days.
This is an act of pure soul-murdering sadism on the part of Mr.
Freeman.
She described being overcome with guilt and confusion, blaming herself for what had happened.
And, as I mentioned in my recent video on Pamela Anderson, not quite of the same literary quality, but...
These assaults upon children generally occur when the parent-child bond, in particular the mother-child bond, is not strong.
And of course, in this case, when the child was sent away at three and didn't return until she was seven, the bond would be very weak.
After days of not eating and staying in bed, Vivian figured out what had happened when she attempted to change the bed linens, and Marguerite fought her, I would assume, because of copious amounts of blood.
Marguerite was taken to the hospital and the maternal grandmother called the police leading to the arrest and trial of Freeman.
Eight-year-old Marguerite testified at Freeman's trial where he was found guilty and sentenced to prison for one year and one day.
For the brutal and possibly reproductive system-destroying rape of an eight-year-old he got one year and one day.
Freeman was released temporarily prior to serving his sentence so that he could get affairs in order, but was found beaten to death later that evening.
Marguerite felt responsible for Freeman's death and believed he died because of her court testimony.
And in the absence of very strong moral instruction from moral parents, it is hard for children to process these kinds of horrors.
But of course, if you have strong moral instruction from moral parents, connected parents, then it's very unlikely that this would happen to children anyway.
So Marguerite thought, my voice killed him.
I killed that man because I told his name.
And then I thought I would never speak again because my voice would kill anyone.
And due to this, little Marguerite did not speak for the next five years.
This is not a family that helps children to process their grief, as you can imagine.
Her family eventually became frustrated with this behavior and began spanking her for not responding to them verbally.
Nothing better than dealing with a child's trauma after rape and the murder of a rapist by beating her.
Shortly after Freeman's death, Marguerite and Bailey were sent back to live with Mama, the paternal grandmother.
During this five-year period, Marguerite developed her interest in the written word, shaping her memory and observational skills.
While back in Stamps, Marguerite spent significant time with Mrs.
Bertha Flowers, a family friend who she credits teaching her the power of the spoken word, which led her to speak once again.
At nine years old, Marguerite started writing poems.
While attending a school graduation ceremony, Marguerite was struck by the speech of white politician Edward Dunleavy.
Dunleavy told the completely black class that they were not equal to whites and would thus be limited in their employment options.
At 12 years old, Marguerite recalls an incident where her brother returned home incredibly upset after witnessing several white men transporting the corpse of a lynched black man.
The whites demanded that Bailey and several other blacks assist in transporting the body to the local jail, even threatening to lock them up with the deceased.
Mama decided it was no longer safe for them in the area and planned a trip back to California.
After six months, Marguerite and Bailey moved back in with their biological mother, Who they had now not seen for five years.
Vivian Baxter had remarried before the return of the children and Marguerite referred to her stepfather as Daddy Clydel.
Tension remained among the family and Marguerite described Vivian's behavior as highly unpredictable but relaxed.
Marguerite and her brother weren't pressured to study hard in school and instead of going to church on Sunday mornings the family went to the movies.
Well, at least there was one sensible decision.
In 1941, Marguerite was 13 and witnessed the disappearance of Japanese Americans into internment camps after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Because remember, in America, you have rights.
With the shrinking Japanese American population, many blacks moved into the area to fill the now available jobs.
That being said, Marguerite described a feeling of underlying racism within the city.
At 15 years old, Marguerite visited her father, but almost immediately there were issues with her father's girlfriend, who was close to her own age.
To which I can only say...
After a physical altercation, i.e.
probably a fistfight, Marguerite left and ended up spending the night in an abandoned car at the local junkyard.
In the junkyard, she met a group of homeless teens and lived with the group for six weeks.
I'm so sorry for these kinds of childhoods.
They're just so heartbreaking.
Marguerite eventually returned home to her biological mother, but conflicts between Vivian and Bailey were frequent, which resulted in Bailey moving out.
With a diminishing interest in school and a desire to earn money, 16-year-old Marguerite took up a job with the Market Street Railway Company, becoming their first black streetcar conductor.
She told the company she was 19 years old.
She worried, according to herself, according to her many autobiographies, she worried she might be a lesbian and initiated sexual intercourse with a teenage boy.
She became pregnant, worried that her pregnancy would bring shame on the family, on the advice of her brother, Marguerite kept the pregnancy a secret.
In June 1945, after graduating high school, she left Daddy Clydel and her mother a letter telling them about her pregnancy.
The family insisted that Marguerite and her baby live with them.
Later that summer, at 17 years old, Marguerite's son, Clyde Bailey Johnson, was born.
Marguerite took jobs as a waitress, exotic dancer, cook, and served as a madam, a manager of prostitutes, and sometimes prostitute at a brothel, but had trouble maintaining employment.
Before her 19th birthday, terrified of her possible arrest for illegal activities, Marguerite decided to join the army.
She was rejected due to her ties to the California Labor School, where she studied dance and drama, which was sponsored by the Communist Party.
Communism, while a massive evil and stain upon human society and human history, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of billions of people, far more than Nazism, In the interim, she eased the pain of rejection with marijuana and continued exotic dancing, i.e.
stripping.
At this point, Bailey intervened in his sister's life and urged her to abandon drugs and seek legitimate employment.
While working a job at a local music store, Marguerite met Tosh Angelos, a white man, and despite warnings from her mother, they married in 1952 and moved in together now.
Kind of an ambiguous and ambivalent situation if your mother, who invited your rapist into your bed as a child, is warning you against a man, that could either mean that he is literally Satan's armpit on earth, or he walks on a frisbee throw of halos.
Now married at the age of 22, Marguerite left her job and became a full-time mother to Clyde.
The marriage quickly became strained as Tosh wasn't religious and didn't want Marguerite going to church.
He also didn't want to include her family in their lives.
Marguerite was deeply religious and secretly began attending church, which when discovered further damaged the relationship.
You know, if I was married to a woman whose mother had invited the rapist into her bed and then beat her for not speaking as the result of the trauma after her rapist was murdered as a result of her testimony, I guess I wouldn't be that keen on having those people in my life either.
But what do I know?
After two and a half years, Marguerite and Tosh divorced, much to the dismay of Clyde, who was incredibly angry about the breakup.
During another stint as an erotic dancer during this period Marguerite decided to use her childhood name Maya and changed her married name Angelos to Angelou.
At 26 years old Angelou got a job as a singer and dancer for a US Department of State musical production which was to tour Europe and Africa.
While on tour Angelou decided to leave her nine-year-old son with her mother, despite her mother's earlier failures to protect her as a child and the incredible sadness she herself experienced by her own parental abandonment.
These unprocessed traumas have such a terrifying and terrible way of replicating, and this would be an example.
After having been on the road for over a year, Maya received a letter from her mother describing her plans to move to Las Vegas and become a dealer in a new African-American casino.
This meant there was no one to take care of now 10-year-old Clyde who had come down with a severe rash that would not respond to medical treatment.
Angelou returned to reconnect with her once outgoing son who had grown quiet and withdrawn.
His skin was also now raw and scaly and despite seeing several medical professionals, nothing helped.
I would imagine stress, but again, what do I know?
Angelou felt guilt that in her absence this had happened and blamed herself for Clyde's poor health.
You know, it's funny, blame and responsibility are just words that really are kind of the same thing.
I blame myself is sort of like a self-attacky phrase that other people are supposed to stop you from doing.
Don't beat yourself up!
I take responsibility for Clyde's poor health is a positive thing, but kind of means the same thing.
Upon her return, she also learned that her brother Bailey was serving time in prison for the sale of stolen goods.
Upset over Bailey's imprisonment and Clyde's illness, Angelou talked to a counselor.
But that session did not give her much comfort.
In the end, she realized, or she believed, and then incessantly put forward the doctrine that you must just forgive yourself and forgive others for everything, which means not taking any responsibility fundamentally for what you do.
Angelou then made the decision that from then on she would not take a job if it meant separation from Clyde.
Angelou spent the next few weeks with her son, and his rash slowly healed, and his appetite returned.
Do you know what's interesting?
I sucked my thumb until I was 16, and my father left my family when I was a baby.
When I was 16, I went to go and visit my father and spent my first night in his house, and I never, ever sucked my thumb again, nor had any desire to.
It's just fascinating the way this stuff works.
During this period, Clyde, now 14 years old, told Angelou he would no longer answer to the name Clyde, but instead he wished to be called Guy.
A year after her return, Angelou became restless as she knew her singing career would only advance if she lived near an active professional music community.
Angelou moved to Los Angeles with Guy and she connected with black poet John Oliver Killens.
With Killens' encouragement, she decided to move again to New York and join the Harlem Writers Guild to further develop her writing skills.
Since Guy's birth, Angelou and Guy had lived in five different areas of San Francisco, three areas of Los Angeles, and even in Hawaii for a brief period of time.
Guy had moved so often that it was difficult for him to make and keep friends.
Despite these concerns, Angelou could not resist the intense desire to belong to an artistic black community.
In 1957, 28-year-old Angelou and Guy moved to Brooklyn, New York, without a job, waiting for her or a place to stay.
After arriving in Brooklyn, Angelou supported herself and Guy by singing in nightclubs, while honing her writing abilities with the Harlem Writers Guild.
Just before Angelou decided to quit singing and pursue a more meaningful career, the manager at the famed Apollo Theatre offered her a week's engagement, which she could not refuse.
One day after her act closed at the Apollo Theater, she went to church in Harlem to hear the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
speaking about the changes taking place in the South and throughout the country.
I have a video on YouTube and, of course, at freedomainradio.com, which is the truth about Martin Luther King Jr., which you might want to check out.
Dr.
King talked of achieving racial equality through peaceful marches, demonstrations, and boycotts.
Dr.
King asked the audience for support, and Angelou was so inspired that she decided to put on a show to raise money for his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
The show, Cabaret for Freedom, ran for the entire summer of 1960 and raised a huge amount of money for the SCLC. After the show closed, 32-year-old Angelou was hired as a coordinator by the organization.
In addition to working for this group, Angelou was one of the founders of the Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage.
This group of African-American women made themselves available to do performances or fashion shows to aid in SCLC fundraising.
Now, probably as a result of her communist indoctrination as a younger woman, Maya Angelou was a supporter of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution.
And on September 18, 1960, Castro led the Cuban delegation to the United Nations in New York City.
In her fourth autobiography, The Heart of a Woman, Angelou describes her experience of the event.
We watched as Castro and Khrushchev embraced on 125th Street, as the Cubans applauded and the Russians smiled broadly, showing metal teeth.
Black people joined the applause.
Some white folks weren't bad at all.
The Russians were okay.
Of course, Castro never had called himself white, so he was okay, from the get-out.
Anyhow, America hated Russians, and as black people often said, wasn't no communist country that put my grandpapa in slavery?
Wasn't no communist lynched my papa or raped my mama?
Yeah, well, but as Christians, it was a significant portion of Jewish leadership of the Communist Party after the 1917 revolution in Russia that murdered tens of millions of Christian kulaks, so...
out of the frying pan into the fire?
She also describes her son's reaction to the events.
Mother, I guess you'll never understand.
To me, a black man, the meeting of Cuba and the Soviet Union in Harlem is the most important thing that could happen.
It means that in my time I'm seeing powerful forces get together to oppose capitalism.
I don't know how it was in your time, the olden days, but in modern America this was something I had to see.
It will influence my future.
It was great to see a communist hatred of capitalism Not interfere with her desire to sell books in the free market and take profits as an author.
It's nice to have that kind of ideological flexibility.
It keeps you from getting all tied down in things like consistency.
During this time, Manchelou became engaged to Thomas Allen, a local bail bondsman.
At John Killen's home, Manchelou met an African freedom fighter named Vusumzi Make.
Marquet, a member of the Pan-African Congress, was in America to petition the UN against South Africa's racial policy.
Angelou and Marquet were both attracted to one another almost instantly.
And when unstable people from bad childhoods are instantly physically attracted to each other, nothing but good stuff can result.
Haven't you found that to be true?
The next time Angelou saw Vosumzi, Marquet, he took her hand and said that he intended to change her life and take her to Africa.
Both Alan and Marquet heavily pursued Angelou by sending her gifts, notes, and flowers, but Angelou decided she would marry Alan.
She arranged to meet Marquet, but before Angelou could explain, Marquet pleaded so intensely that Angelou changed her mind.
Angelou had known Marquet only a little over a week, but she accepted his marriage proposal, thus providing the base plotline for the movie Frozen in a couple of decades.
When she resigned from her job at SCLC, she sent King a letter that noted, I join with millions of black people the world over and saying, you are our leader.
At the end of the week, she traveled with Marquet to London.
While on the plane, Marquet took her hand and said that he was marrying her that very minute, and Angelou agreed.
They never formalized their relationship or spoke of marriage again.
Guy and his new stepfather quickly became devoted to one another, but Marquet was obsessive about claimliness, insistence that Angelou not work outside the home, and his controlling nature quickly strained their relationship.
Angelou continued to attend meetings with the Harlem Writers Guild and hid her relationship to dissatisfaction.
And this is something I've also noticed about communists, is that their personal lives are complete Chaos.
I'm not saying Angelou was a committed communist, but she was a fan of communists and had received education in communism and hated capitalism, so you fill in the dots if you see fit, but I see a hammer and sickle.
Their personal lives are such chaos, and the interesting thing is that while they reject things like hierarchies in economics, they often submit to the most brutal hierarchies in their personal relationships.
Angelou attended a live speech by a fellow named Malcolm X. His philosophy of civil rights and politics was nearly the opposite of Dr.
King and found the different, more angry tone attractive due to her frustrations with the treatment of blacks in the United States.
On the same day that Angelou heard Malcolm X, she received the news that Patrice Lumumba, a freedom fighter in the African Congo, had been assassinated.
She and her group planned to hold a demonstration at the UN General Assembly and drew a surprisingly huge crowd.
They went to Malcolm X to ask his advice about future events and while he was supportive, he would not commit to further assistance.
He specifically told Angelou he did not believe in peaceful public demonstrations.
In 1961, Angelou and Guy connected with a group of black American expatriates in Ghana and 16-year-old Guy made plans to attend the University of Ghana for college.
Within three days of arriving in Ghana, Guy was seriously injured in a car accident, suffering a broken neck.
During this time, Angelou developed an alcohol dependency, because remember, it was capitalists who were exploiting her and oppressing her.
Guy was released from the hospital one month after the accident, and plans were made for him to move into the University of Ghana dorm and begin college.
There's something I want you to remember.
It's my neck and my life, he said.
I will live it whole or not at all.
I love you, Mom.
Maybe now you'll have a chance to grow up.
That is a pretty terrible thing to hear from your child, that they wish you had or would someday grow up.
After frequent situations where Markay did not come home at night and several community interventions to save the relationship, Maya and Markay separated.
In the spring of 1963, Angelou arranged a demonstration in front of the American Embassy in Ghana in conjunction with Dr.
King's March on Washington, despite being angry and impatient with the slow progress of the American civil rights movement.
At 19, Guy started to date a woman older than his mother, much to her disagreement, and Angelou decided to distance herself from Guy.
That's a great solution there.
This led to a confrontation where Guy told his mother that he considered himself an independent man and he wanted them to lead separate lives.
Tragic.
In 1964, Angelou reconnected with Malcolm X, who had been changed after his pilgrimage to Mecca and no longer preached hatred for white Americans.
Malcolm X approached Angelou and asked if she would return to New York and work for his group, the Organization of Afro-American Unity.
She accepted.
Two days after she arrived in New York, Malcolm X was shot and killed while giving a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.
Filled with sadness, Angelou could not understand the lack of demonstrations or riots following Malcolm X's assassination.
It was at this point where she decided that she no longer wanted to have anything to do with politics and with the New York job no longer being available, she moved to Los Angeles.
After finishing college in Ghana, Guy traveled to San Francisco but was tragically involved in another car accident and suffered yet another broken neck.
Angelou stayed with her son for several weeks before leaving for New York, and arrangements were made for him to stay with his grandmother upon his release from the hospital.
Just terrible.
While in New York, Angelou once again connected with Dr.
King and agreed to assist with fundraising for his upcoming Poor People's March on Washington, D.C. April the 4th, 1968, Angelou's forced 40th birthday, Martin Luther King Jr.
was assassinated.
This news sent Angelou into depression, where she once again contemplated going silent, much as she had after the death of her rapist at eight years old.
Several friends insisted that she call them once a day and not return to her muted state.
Angelou was eventually hired by a San Francisco television station to write and direct a 10-part series on an insider's view of African America.
The series was called Blacks, Blues, Black and received favorable reviews.
During this time, she was approached by Random House publishing about writing her autobiography.
While she originally resisted, she eventually agreed.
In 1970, 42-year-old Angelou published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first volume of her autobiography, which details her life from childhood through the birth of her son.
She became the first black woman to make the non-fiction bestseller list and thus began a period of great happiness and further success with both writing and lecturing, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her first volume of poetry.
In 1973, Angelou married her third husband, Paul Dufus, and also became a grandmother with the birth of Guy's son, Colin Ashanti Murphy Johnson.
In 1975, Angelou was appointed to the American Revolution Bicentennial Council by President Gerald Ford.
She also received an Emmy nomination for her portrayal of Nyo Boto in the television miniseries Roots.
After the publication of her fourth autobiography, her third marriage fell apart and she divorced in 1981.
Shortly after her divorce, she received the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem.
Where she lectured and continued her writing to great success and critical acclaim.
During this time, the mother of Guy's child absconded with Angelou's grandson, and it took over four years to find him, and these family tragedies continue.
No matter how much success, how much money, how many prizes, a lack of self-criticism and self-knowledge leads to these inevitable whiplash disasters.
When Sharon Johnson pleaded guilty to child stealing, Guy Johnson and Angelou asked the court for leniency.
Angelou explained, Guy does not want Colin to think we put his mother in jail.
And I explained to Guy that there's a bond made in the womb between the child and the mother.
I mean, that bond is irreducible.
Well, although she did abandon her children just as she was abandoned and just as the mother ripped the son from the father her own child.
I agreed there's no way we can get any joy out of her being in prison or get back any of the four years.
In 1992, Angelou's mother Vivian Baxter died.
Angelou's professional success continued and she was asked by President-elect Bill Clinton to compose and read a poem for his inauguration and became the first black woman to read a poem at a presidential inauguration.
In 94, the NAACP Presented Angelou with the prestigious Spring Arne Medal, which has been described as the African-American Nobel Prize.
In 1995, Angelou spoke at the Million Man March organized by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and lent her support to the convicted cop killer and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal advocating that he receive a new trial.
Abu-Jamal is currently serving life in prison without the possibility of parole.
In 1997, Angelou commented, A black person grows up in this country and in many places, knowing that racism will be as familiar as salt to the tongue.
Reasoning from that premise, she praised affirmative action and head start as programs that were not only good for the country, but quite necessary, because, she said, the playing field had been terribly unlevel, terribly unfair for centuries.
In the same interview, Angelou was asked if she thought our free market system, capitalism itself, creates divisions and inequality, to which she replied, yes, absolutely.
Unfortunately, I cannot find many other isms that don't do the same thing.
Affirmative action has been largely disastrous for blacks in many ways, because underqualified blacks gain entrance to a university, the intelligent and qualified blacks get lost in the mix, and then employers don't know who was qualified and who wasn't, and thus avoid hiring blacks, which lowers the value of a college education, even for the intelligent and ambitious blacks, which is one of the reasons why it tends to diminish.
In 2010, President Barack Obama named her a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor, probably for running point and calling anyone who didn't agree with him a closet racist.
In 2012, Angelou strongly supported Obama's re-election bid, saying, quote, I think he has done a remarkable job knowing how much he has been opposed every suggestion he makes the Republicans en masse fight against him or don't vote at all.
In an email she authored for the Obama campaign, Angelou said, So, I guess she did fiction as well as non-fiction.
As the election approached, Angelou predicted that Obama's detractors would undoubtedly give voice to their own inner racism.
I tell you, we're going to see some nastiness, some vulgarity, I think.
They'll pull the sheets off, right?
So, if you criticize President Obama, you are a racist.
But don't worry, that'll change next year when, if you oppose Hillary Clinton, you suddenly go from racist to sexist.
It's a great trick.
In a discussion with Al Sharpton, Angelou derided Obama's critics as stupid, thick, and dense people who want to keep us polarized.
Well, at least that's not polarizing, Maya.
Good job not being polarizing.
And also, great job at the forgiveness thing, you know, because forgiveness and gentleness and so on is great, I guess, unless there's political power in play.
In 2013, Angelou opposed the acquittal of George Zimmerman.
She lamented that the jury verdict showed how far we have to go.
As a nation, that one man armed with a gun can actually profile a young man because he is black and end up shooting him dead.
It is so painful.
I also, of course, have a video on Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, which we'll link to below.
Angelou died on the morning of 28th May 2014 at 86 years old.
She wrote 16 books, won dozens of awards, and was awarded over 30 honorary doctoral degrees.
She always ended her lectures by telling the audience, courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.
Forgiveness, she says, is the greatest gift you can give yourself.
It's not for the other person, Angelou said.
You must forgive.
It's for your own sake, to rid yourself of that weight.
That's the answer.
Forgive everybody.
I guess, except capitalists, white people, the man who raped her, you sort of can go on and on.
There's people who preach forgiveness in general, have done terrible wrongs in their own life, and wish to unburden themselves, and thus don't end up applying this as a universal principle across the board.
In her book, Mom and Me and Mom, which discussed unconditional love and support, Angelou thanks her mother, who generously taught me how to be a mother.
Who generously taught me how to be a mother.
Sentimentality, as Jung pointed out, is the superstructure or flip side of brutality.
And her mother abandoned her, put her on a train at the age of three, with a to whom it may concern wrist stamp, invited a rapist, a child rapist, into her bed, and beat her when she went mute.
After her rapist was murdered, to some degree as a result of her testimony.
And this is the mother who generously taught her how to be a mother.
Tragically, there's probably some truth in that, but probably not in the way that she intended.
She says, History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
When you look at the cycle of abuse that occurred in this family, how can she say that she overcame her history and has enough wisdom and enough knowledge to tell other people what is virtue, what is good motherhood, what is good parenting, what is being a good human being?
And can she really, I would say, with a straight face, honorably tell people that she knows how to break the cycle of abuse when you look at what happened with her own children?
I think that we need to look elsewhere for our moral heroes and have a clear-eyed view of how people live rather than what they say, which tends to, in general, be at opposing poles of the moral spectrum.
This is Stefan Molyneux for Free Domain Radio.
Thank you so much for watching.
As always, if you'd like to help out the show, fdrurl.com forward slash donate.
