Viewing page 6 of 14

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Transcription: [00:19:26]
{SPEAKER name="Dr. Maya Angelou"}
I also think that courage is- It may mean that that which causes the blood to continue to- to run coarsely in our veins. It may keep the stars in the firmament for all I know.

[00:19:43]
I know that when you have love, you are patient with people who make mistakes. First with yourself. You have to have it for yourself, or you can't have it for anyone else.

[00:19:57]
So you forgive yourself, then you ask God for forgiveness. Then you ask your person whose name you may have taken in vain. Someone whose feelings you may have hurt.

[00:20:08]
You ask them for forgiveness. But the first thing you have to do is convince yourself that you are forgivable. And so that takes patience. And so, I think

[00:20:22]
that by the time you're eighty-six, maybe I could've done it better at eighty-five but I didn't.

[00:20:28]
[laughter and applause]

[00:20:31]
I think I'm better today than I was day before yesterday.

[00:20:35]
{SPEAKER name="Johnnetta Cole"}
Dr.Maya, I know that April the fourth is a bittersweet day for you. While it is the day that you came into the world, it is also the day that our beloved Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated.

{SPEAKER name="Dr. Maya Angelou"}
Yeah. Yeah it's true.

[00:20:56]
{SPEAKER name="Johnnetta Cole"}
Would you just share with us some of your most precious memories of working with Dr. King in the Civil Rights Movement?

[00:21:09]
{SPEAKER name="Dr. Maya Angelou"}
Yes, thank you. One of the things that is not known much, Reverend Andrew Young can attest to that, reverend, ambassador, brother, mayor.

{SPEAKER name="Johnnetta Cole"}
Mayor!

[00:21:26]
-could attest to that, Reverend King had a wonderful sense of humor and nobody talks about his humor, and that's unfortunate, because it means that young people

[00:21:38]
like my great grand-here or my great grand-there, she's here some-, my great-grands, may think that Rev-, Martin Luther King was so great, he wasn't human.

[00:21:51]
And so I can't- I can't approach that, I can't even dream to be that, but he was human, and he made the mistakes that human beings make and he was able to forgive himself

[00:22:03]
and everybody, and everybody! In Selma, and- I mean in Selma, you could forgive, goodness gracious, go to prison how many times, and forgive. My land.

[00:22:16]
I've just written a piece about Nelson Mandela, same thing. Great people do have that and sometimes they don't have to live to be eighty-six, to have it, the ability to forgive.

[00:22:30]
But you have to have patience. And Reverend King had great patience. And he would tell a joke in the back of a car, he'd be sitting in the back and we'd be going to a fundraiser,

[00:22:41]
and he would tell a joke, and make the driver almost crash the car, [laughter] because very few people expected him to be funny, but he was hilarious, he could be hilarious.

[00:22:53]
And he was kind. That's another thing that happens when you have patience, you learn to be kind and compassionate.