Why Maya Angelou’s Memoir I Know Why The Caged Chicken Sings Turned One of many Most Banned Books of All Time

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Some excellent news: Maya Angelou’s 1969 memoir I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, a recounting of her first 17 years, together with a rape on the age of seven or 8 by her mom’s boyfriend, and her subsequent emotional trauma, not leads the American Library Affiliation’s Office for Intellectual Freedom’s list of banned and challenged books.

The dangerous information: there’ll at all times be titles assigned to high schoolers that vividly depict younger individuals’s precise expertise, that oldsters and group teams will goal on related grounds.

New African listed a few of the verbatim objections which were leveled in opposition to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – that it inspired “profanity”, was stuffed with “descriptions of drug abuse, sexually specific conduct and torture”, preached “bitterness and hatred in opposition to whites”, was “prone to corrupt minors” and contained “inappropriately specific sexual scenes.”

Angelou, who accused the guide’s detractors of not studying greater than two phrases of it, bridled that anybody would “act as if their youngsters are usually not confronted with the identical threats.”

Mollie Godfrey’s TED-Ed lesson, animated by Laura White. above, factors out how radical Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings was for a piece of its time:

Her autobiography was one of many first to talk overtly about youngster sexual abuse and particularly groundbreaking to take action from the attitude of the abused youngster. For hundreds of years Black ladies writers have been restricted by stereotypes characterizing them as hypersexual. Afraid of reinforcing these stereotypes, few had been prepared to put in writing about their sexuality in any respect however Angelou refused to be constrained. She publicly explored her most private expertise with out apology or disgrace.

Robert P. Doyle, vice-president of the Freedom to Read Foundation, revealed that the ALA was impressed to launch Banned Books Week in 1982, when the American Booksellers Affiliation displayed I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and different works in a cage exterior the doorway to their annual convention:

The show generated a variety of press consideration. And the guide group realized that now we have not solely a chance, however a accountability to have interaction the American public in a dialog in regards to the First Modification because it pertains to books and literature. A coalition was shaped instantly with the authors, publishers, and main distribution facilities (bookstores and libraries) within the U.S. to attract consideration to the significance of the liberty to learn, to publicize threats to that freedom, and to offer data to fight the lack of understanding.

Lots of the guide’s excessive profile defenders found it at a formative age, together with rapper Common, who determined to change into a author after encountering it as a fifth grader, and Oprah Winfrey, who was blown away to study that one other younger Black lady had additionally endured sexual abuse:

I learn these phrases and thought, “Someone is aware of who I’m.”

No much less shifting is a touch upon Godfrey’s TED-Ed lesson left by a instructor in Texas:

Caged Chicken helped saved my life. Grateful for the day my eleventh grade English instructor at a conservative Christian college handed it to me and mentioned, “learn this, candy pea”…I nonetheless encourage my college students at a conservative Christian college in TX to learn it.”

“I’m glad you bought the make it easier to wanted,” one other viewer responded. “I dwell in Florida, and that instructor who helped you’ll be charged with a felony right here. I’m useless critical.”