Letter to My Daughter

Angelou writes that for the past few decades the national spirit and natural joy of the American people have ebbed and flowed. Expectations have diminished and hope for the future has waned. She states, “[P]oliticians must be told if they continue to sink into the mud of obscenity, they will proceed alone” (42). Americans must prove ourselves as the courteous and courageous well-meaning citizens that they are on the inside. Angelou ends this chapter with a sense of urgency, writing that this change must happen “now.”

Angelou recounts the Great Migration of Black people to the North, drawn by the promise of better lives. “Their expectations,” Angelou writes, “were at once fulfilled and at the same time dashed to the ground and broken into shards of disappointment” (43). The sense of fulfillment arose from the shift from the “dull drudgery of sharecrop farming” to “protected work under unionized agreements” (43). Unfortunately, the climate in the North did not prove free of racism, and Black Americans faced new, more humiliating discrimination. Northern white people had “public smiles of liberal acceptance” but their “private behavior of utter rejection angered the immigrants” (43). This false promise and memories of the South have created a new great migration back to what Angelou calls “the land of their foreparents” (43).