In 1998, a Maryland school district removed one of American literature’s most acclaimed works 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 Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.”
Few books have been challenged more often than Angelou's memoir. And while book banning decisions typically aren’t made at the state or national level, most of the schools and libraries that have banned Angelou’s book have given similar reasons. Most commonly, they argue that the memoir’s account of sexual assault and the violence of US racism are inappropriate for young readers. But 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, “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” 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 book chronicles Angelou’s journey to rediscover her voice, all while exploring the pain and misplaced shame that emerges from avoiding uncomfortable realities.
The memoir’s narrative voice expertly blends her childhood confusion with her adult understanding, offering the reader insights Angelou was deprived of as a child. She connects her early experiences of being silenced and shamed to the experience of being poor and Black in the segregated United States. “The Black female,” she writes, “is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate, and Black lack of power.” Her autobiography was one of the first books to speak openly about child sexual abuse, and 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 recalling how a fellow student defied instructions not to sing the Black National Anthem in the presence of white guests, she writes, “The tears that slipped down many faces were not wiped away in shame. We were on top again... We survived.”
Angelou’s memoir was published amidst the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, when 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. On the American Library Association’s list of most frequently banned or challenged books, “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” remained near the top for two decades. But parents, students, and educators have consistently fought back in support of the memoir. And 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. And that’s terrible.” She believed that children who are old enough to be the victims of sexual abuse and racism are old enough to read about these subjects. Because listening and learning are essential to overcoming, and the unspeakable is far more dangerous when left unspoken.
