Maya Angelou Inspires Thousands at Brookdale Community College

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27 February 2009 :: J.E. Robertson

Brookdale Community College sold out its Collins Arena, Wednesday night, for ‘An Evening with Maya Angelou’, bringing three thousand people to see the poet, activist and educator speak. She moved the crowd to tears and laughter with personal stories, philosophical messages and a call to take pride and passion in the humanizing capability of learning. The caged bird sings, and beats its wings against the painful limitations of its situation, because it is deprived of opportunities to see, to learn, to explore.

The great American poet spoke for just over an hour, and she disarmed her audience with anecdotes of personal fare, humor about the weakness, presumption and sometimes astonishing kindnesses, of strangers, about how we fall into misconceptions or get lost in bursts of emotion. But her humor was dignified and sacred, throughout, and carried with it a message about the inherent, implacable value of humanity, and of sharing it.

Dr. Angelou cited Publius Terentius Afer who lived from 195 or 185 to 159 BC, a playwright commonly known as Terence. He said “I am a human being; nothing human can be alien to me”, by her telling. Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto. Terence was born a slave in Roman north Africa, and was sold to a Roman senator, who educated him and later freed him. Terence became renowned for his plays, but due to his station at birth could never be a Roman citizen.

Angelou told the story of Terence and noted the weight of his words, that being human, “nothing human can be alien to me”, emphasizing that his seeing Rome and his Roman audience as fully human, as flawed but made of the same fabric, is astonishing, a brave act of generosity, considering the exclusion he suffered. She urged her audience to see that “if you can internalize just a part of that statement, you are liberated”.

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Throughout her talk, she came back to the topic of how human beings are liberated by education. She sought to inspire her audience to “know… the power of a Brookdale Community College” (she emphasized these last three words with rhapsodic strains, a gift to her audience), to understand that the value of an institution of higher education is in the vision and abilities it brings to those who study there and the vision and passion they bring to learning.

At the very beginning, then again throughout her talk, she chimed a woeful melody, singing “When it looked like the sun would not shine anymore, God put a rainbow in the clouds” The meaning of that was that there is hope in unlikely places, that when the rains persist so long the world is flooded, the spirit still has ways of knowing, remembering, that the sun shines behind the clouds and a new day will come.

For her, that spirit, that rainbow in the clouds energy, was embodied by her Uncle Willy, a large man with a severe neurological condition on one side of his body, who took her and her brother in as children and pushed her to learn her multiplication tables and to read and write. His commitment to her learning had made her love to learn, and had inspired her to emerge from her hardships and be the searcher she became.

When he died, she returned to Stamps, Arkansas, where he had helped to raise her, passing through Little Rock on the way. There she was asked to meet with someone who wanted to meet her and express his gratitude. He told her that Willy had made him the man he had become, because Willy had instilled in him a love of learning.

As a kid, the man had worked at Willy’s store in Stamps, and Willy had forced him to learn his multiplication tables, and commit to his studies. “Arkansas lost a great man when Willy died”, he told her, expanding on the sentiment to say the United States, and then the world, had “lost a great man”.

The kid who worked for Willy at his general store had become Mayor Charles Bussey, the first African American mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas. They traded stories about Uncle Willy holding them in their seat at the kitchen table, demanding a full report of the multiplication tables, demanding evidence of the fire of learning. The light of the rainbow that was Willy had reached Mayor Bussey, and by extension all the people of Little Rock.

That light was reaching everyone in attendance at Brookdale as well. Angelou told of having to hide Willy on nights when “The Boys” would ride, a fearsome band of hulking young white men who menaced black men in and around Stamps. Mayor Bussey gave Angelou a police escort all the way to Stamps, a group of “eight white men, with guns” she would say, a kind of happiness coming over her as she settles on the ironic beauty of that gesture, how in a sense good outlasted bad and the sun came through the clouds, after all.

She urged the students in her audience, or anyone who might have access to a library, to go the following day and ask a librarian to show them the way to some poetry, that would enable them to feel “the courage and humor and dignity” fit to make them “a rainbow in the clouds”, a light for others to learn by, a spirit that says yes and can persevere.

When the United Nations celebrated the 50th anniversary of its founding, she was asked to write a poem for the occasion. She wept at the beauty of going to San Francisco to deliver those words, to honor the hopes of the world, because she remembered watching Eleanor Roosevelt and the educator Mary McLeod Bethune entering that building, feeling that if she were not “16 years old, and 6 feet tall, and black”, she might be able to be one of the interpreters there.

Then “Imagine 50 years later to be invited to write a poem”… she reminded her audience, gracious to her core in recognizing that “I could not have done it without the rainbows in my clouds”. Those lights in the darkness, those acts of human generosity, make it possible to get through dark times.

She urged her audience to know that “all of this has already been paid for”, that the right to be there, to learn at a 21st-century American college or university, had been “paid for” by the blood and the sweat and the tears of past generations, the sacrifices of those who had come to America either seeking their freedom or curled up in bondage, forced to lie in excrement “and menstrual flow” aboard slave ships, or Asian immigrants in the mid 19th century “who came to build this country, where they were not allowed to bring their families for many years, or ever own land”.

Those ancestors had made this country and now the opportunity to learn and to be something great came down to the current generation. And this heritage was not only cultural, not only about America and its sins and its strengths, but about the sanctity of life in the world: “All of this belongs to all of us, all the time — stop limiting yourselves!” the poet urged.

She added that “They have paid for each of us, already … and all you have to do is liberate yourselves, so you can liberate those yet to come.” She cited a relative who used to say to her, “When you get, give; when you learn, teach.” She ended her talk with “A Brave and Startling Truth“, the poem she wrote for the UN, which calls on all humanity, saying “We must confess that we are the possible…”