“He was born the son of sharecroppers on February 21, 1940, outside of Troy, Alabama. He grew up on his family’s farm and attended segregated public schools in Pike County, Alabama. As a young boy, he was inspired by the activism surrounding the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., which he heard on radio broadcasts. In those pivotal moments, he made a decision to become a part of the Civil Rights Movement. Ever since then, he has remained at the vanguard of progressive social movements and the human rights struggle in the United States.
As a student at Fisk University, John Lewis organized sit-in demonstrations at segregated lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1961, he volunteered to participate in the Freedom Rides, which challenged segregation at interstate bus terminals across the South. Lewis risked his life on those Rides many times by simply sitting in seats reserved for white patrons. He was also beaten severely by angry mobs and arrested by police for challenging the injustice of Jim Crow segregation in the South.”
I listened, overwhelmed by a substantial empathy, and I observed the rapt attention being paid to this man by an audience currently reflective of the American demographic landscape. His resounding message: “Never give up! Never give in!”
And as I sat there in that audience listening to Congressman Lewis, the words of Dr Maya Angelou came to mind :
“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”
Dr. Maya Angelou… A woman who “phenomenally” refused to be defined by adverse circumstances, the scars of which she carried in her own being. Even now she “rises” … and she lifts us with her to new heights of consciousness and being! I hear her wonderfully commanding and beautifully distinct voice in my head constantly. She speaks with a powerful eloquence that stirs in us a mixture of memory and emotion that cannot be ignored.
“Out of the huts of history’s shame … I rise!
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain … I rise!
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear … I rise!
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear … I rise!
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise! I rise! I rise!”
Leaving behind days and nights and months and years and decades and centuries of terror and fear … we rise. There is a life-proliferating quality to the work of Dr. Maya Angelou. Her literary offerings and the emotions they elicit plant themselves in our consciousness almost effortlessly, and they thrive there as if they have always been there… though at times unnoticed.
In an act of cultural and spiritual intimacy Maya Angelou draws us to a most sacred place on our life-journey; and in this place we experience a mating of ideas and ideals that leave us pregnant with the expectation of something greater for ourselves and the other selves connected to us. Her creative genius reaches deep within us and calls forth the memory of our sacred obligation to “be fruitful and multiply”. Hers is a call echoing from the Eden of our very beginnings. It is a call to new dreams, and new hopes, and a new vitality. She encourages us to revise and refine and redefine who we are and who we would be. In that respect Maya Angelou joins the Martin Luther Kings, the Mandelas, the Marleys, and all the other revolutionary voices in engendering the ongoing work of renewal among us.
Let us listen… And may those words become flesh and live in and through us. We are the dream and the hope of our ancestors.
