New Semester

In “Champion of the World”, Maya Angelou recalls her community gathering in her grandfather’s Store to listen to Joe Louis’s championship boxing match. She describes Louis as a symbol of black empowerment and details the tense feeling of anticipation in the room as they waited for him to prove that they were “the strongest people in the world.” Despite all the celebration after the Brown Bomber’s victory, Angelou still notices that it is still unsafe for them to travel late at night, and that whites still hold power in determining where blacks go and when. At the end of the story, African Americans are still distant from attaining equality.

Coming away from this story, I was a little bit confused about what Angelou wanted us to take away as her opinion on the whole event. In one aspect, she applauded Louis for being this otherworldly symbol of power for her race, but at the same time, she ended the passage on a borderline pessimistic note. It’s hard to say whether she aimed to give readers hope or dash their hope to pieces by asserting that victories like Louis’s do nothing to further Civil Rights. However, the fact that Angelou’s take on the memory is so multi-dimensional is what makes her autobiography so realistic to me, even if I’ve never been a black girl growing up in the South. After all, no impactful experience in my life has ever been exclusively positive or negative, so there’s no reason for me to expect Angelou’s experiences to be.