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In 1998, a Maryland school district removed Maya Angelou’s acclaimed autobiography, “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings,” from its curriculum. Parents pushing for the ban said the book was both “sexually explicit” and “anti-white.” Following an outcry from other parents and teachers, the decision was eventually reversed. But this was neither the first nor the last attack on the book. Few books have been challenged more often than Angelou’s memoir, and most of the schools and libraries that have banned it have given similar reasons: that the memoir’s account of sexual assault and the violence of US racism are inappropriate for young readers.
However, these concerns miss the point of Angelou’s story, which uses these very themes to explore the danger of censorship and silence in the lives of young people. Published in 1969, the book traces the author’s childhood growing up poor, Black, and female in the southern US. Central to the narrative is Angelou’s experience of being sexually assaulted when she was seven and a half years old. Surrounded by adults who consider the subject too taboo to discuss, Angelou decides that she is to blame. And when she finally identifies her abuser in court, he is killed by vigilantes. Angelou believes her voice is responsible for his death, and for six years, she stops speaking almost entirely.
The memoir was one of the first books to speak openly about child sexual abuse, and was especially groundbreaking to do so from the perspective of the abused child. For centuries, Black women writers had been limited by stereotypes characterizing them as hypersexual. Afraid of reinforcing these stereotypes, few were willing to write about their sexuality at all. But Angelou refused to be constrained. She publicly explored her most personal experience, without apology or shame. This spirit of defiance charges her writing with a sense of hope that combats the memoir’s often traumatic subject matter.
When the book was published amidst the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, activists were calling for school curricula that reflected the diversity of experiences in the US. But almost as soon as the book appeared in schools, it was challenged. Campaigns to control lesson plans surged across America in the 1970s and 80s, and “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” remained near the top of the American Library Association’s list of most frequently banned or challenged books for two decades.
However, parents, students, and educators have consistently fought back in support of the memoir. By 2013, it had become the second most taught non-fiction text in US high school English classes. When asked how she felt about writing one of the most banned books, Angelou said, “I find that people who want my book banned have never read a paragraph of my writing, but have heard that I write about a rape. They act as if their children are not faced with the same threats.” “That’s terrible,” she thought. She believed that children who are mature enough to experience sexual abuse and racism are mature enough to read about these topics. She believed that listening and learning are essential to overcoming and that the unspeakable is far more dangerous when it is not discussed.