65 pages • 2 hours read
The Heart of a Woman
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Background
Social Context: The US Civil Rights Movement
The civil rights movement of the 1950s-1960s sought to address systemic racial prejudice in the United States, including segregation across public life, and focused on education, transport, and voter registration. In 1954, a protest by Black students at Moton High School in Virginia, supported by the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), led to a legal case known as Brown v. the Board of Education, at the conclusion of which the US Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional. Resistance remained high, and the struggle to desegregate public universities in the South carried on until 1962, when President John F. Kennedy sent US Army troops and federalized Mississippi National Guard forces onto the University of Mississippi campus to quell rioting, which broke out after the court of appeals upheld Black student and activist James Meredith’s right to enroll.
The huge public outcry in 1955 at the brutal murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago, while he was staying with relatives in Mississippi, did much to galvanize the movement. In the same year, Rosa Parks, secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a public bus, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which resulted in the desegregation of Montgomery buses in 1956. In 1961, civil rights activists, setting out from Washington, DC, organized a series of “Freedom Rides” on buses in the segregated South. These protests led to mob violence, with a bus being firebombed in Anniston and freedom riders being badly beaten by the Ku Klux Klan in Birmingham, Alabama. Over 300 freedom riders were arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, over the course of the summer of 1961. They were subjected to harsh treatment in prison, and public sympathy for their plight resulted in President Kennedy’s intervention and the full desegregation of public buses.
Black voter registration was fiercely contested in the Southern states. For example, when the Fayette County Civic and Welfare League successfully raised the number of Black voters in the county from 17 to 1400, the White Citizens Council circulated a banned list of registered voters and local businesses conspired to deny them essential services. Two-hundred-and-fifty-seven families of registered voters were evicted from their homes and left living in tents until, in December 1960, the Justice Department intervened.
The civil rights movement was beset with internal ideological struggles. Whereas Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC espoused pacifism and integration, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam were segregationist and disputed the efficacy of non-violent resistance. Some conservative groups within the Black community believed that the integration process should proceed more slowly, in order to avoid political and social upheaval and to leave community leaders free to focus on other issues. Black religious and business leaders who benefited from white patronage were often averse to change, as they did not want to risk losing the privileges they had accrued under segregation. This struggle plays out in The Heart of a Woman in Angelou’s activism for the SCLC and in her interactions with Martin Luther King Jr, and Malcolm X, both of whom she encountered in her activist work. Angelou often notes overheard comments of Black folks discussing the differences between the divergent viewpoints the speakers represent but does not comment on them. Angelou sees the merits and disadvantages of both sides but never wholly commits to one or the other.
Literary Context: African American Literature
African American literature has always been closely tied up with the Black struggle for civil rights and equality. Before the American Civil War, African American literature primarily consisted in slave narratives, which consisted of accounts by former enslaved people of life under enslavement and their journey to freedom. Perhaps the most famous of these was the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave (1845), a revised and expanded version of which was published in 1855 under the title My Bondage and My Freedom. The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, to which Angelou refers in Chapter 10, is an early example of an autobiographical slave narrative by an African American woman. Sojourner Truth was born with enslaved status in Ulster County, New York. She was involved in recruiting Black troops during the Civil War and counseled President Abraham Lincoln. She remained illiterate but was able to record her memoirs thanks to the help of Olive Gilbert, a white woman.
In the immediate post-slavery period, a number of important nonfiction texts by authors such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington focused on the conditions and position of Black Americans in American society.
The flowering of Black American culture during the Harlem Renaissance (1920s-1940s) marked a turning point for African American literature. Work by Black American authors, such as poet Langston Hughes and novelist Zora Neale Hurston, together with that of jazz musicians, playwrights, and artists began to be absorbed into and accepted by mainstream culture.
The rise of the civil rights movement inspired authors such as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison to address issues such as segregation, racism, and Black nationalism in their writings. During this period, a growing number of Black female poets rose to prominence, with Gwendolyn Brooks becoming the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for her 1949 book of poetry, Annie Allen. From 1965 to 1975, the Black Arts Movement (BAM), was a New York-based writer collection that blended art and activism. Major writers, such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, contributed to this movement, which helped to bring African American literature into the mainstream. Maya Angelou was active in BAM through her work at the Harlem Writers Guild. Her seven autobiographies, written between 1969 and 2013, situate her as one of the main voices of 20th-century African American literature.
Historical Context: The Cold War, Decolonization, and US Race Relations
The Cold War was a prolonged period of geopolitical tension between the USSR and the US. The allies of both powers were drawn into the conflict, which polarized a great part of the world between the Eastern (pro-Soviet) and Western (pro-US) blocs. This polarization began after World War II with the formation of NATO, a defensive alliance largely geared toward containing the expansion of Soviet influence, in 1949, and the subsequent establishment of its pro-Soviet counterpart, the Warsaw Pact, in 1955.
As a political alternative to the Western capitalist system under which they were oppressed, both Black Americans and colonized peoples turned to communism and socialism, which were based on principles of workers’ equality. The US fear that decolonization would lead to the spread of communism led them to intervene in newly decolonized countries in Asia and Africa, sometimes disrupting democratic process, violating national sovereignty, and supporting brutal totalitarian regimes.
In 1947, Truman signed Executive Order 9835, which established a loyalty oath program for federal employees. This involved checking whether federal workers were loyal or even sympathetic to any of the groups listed on the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations which, significantly, included the National Negro Congress and the Council on African Affairs. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) proceeded to extend the Loyalty Oath program to Hollywood and to double the size of the FBI. The ideological “witch-hunt” that followed came to be known as McCarthyism, after Senator Joseph R. “Joe” McCarthy, who took a leading role in the process beginning in 1950. As the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) had played a key role in the early civil rights struggle, many Black activists had been at least loosely involved with the organization at some stage in their work. This gave the FBI an added pretext to harass civil rights leaders. For example, although Martin Luther King Jr. actively preached against communism from the early 1950s, he was accused of representing a Communist threat because of his brief association with Stanley Levison, who had been a financier of CPUSA. King’s phones were tapped as a result of this association, and Bayard Rustin, who had introduced King to Levison, was forced to leave the SCLC. In The Heart of a Woman, Angelou describes how she was asked to take over leadership of the SCLC from Ruskin because of Ruskin’s former ties to CPUSA. Though Angelou never joined CPUSA, she and her associates supported Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba and protested at the UN after Patrice Lumumba’s assassination. In the autobiography, Angelou and her friends often discuss the dangers of their political activism in the era of McCarthyism.
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