65 pages • 2 hours read
Maya AngelouThe Heart of a Woman
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1981A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Index of Terms
Crackers
“Crackers” is a pejorative term used to refer to white people in the Southern states of the USA. The origins of the word are unclear. It may derive from the Gaelic term “craic,” meaning loud conversation or boastful talk. It is perhaps also a reference to the cracking of whips by enslavers.
Uhuru
“Uhuru” is the Swahili word for “freedom.” In Chapter 3, Angelou describes her experience singing a song with this title, which she had learned from the Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji, at the Apollo theater in Harlem.
SCLC
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was founded in 1957 by Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists. The group sought to further the civil rights cause through non-violent activism, harnessing the moral authority and organizational capacities of Black churches. Maya Angelou became the Northern coordinator for the SCLC in 1959.
Uncle Tom
The epithet “Uncle Tom” alludes to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or Life Among the Lowly. This highly popular, sentimental novel did a great deal to further the abolitionist cause in the 1850s. However, the text came to be criticized for perpetuating negative stereotypes regarding Black people. In particular, the name of its eponymous main character, Uncle Tom, came to be a byword for a Black person who is eagerly subservient to white people.
PAC
The PAC (Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania) is a South African liberation movement and political party that broke away from the ANC (African National Congress) in 1959. The PAC espoused an African nationalist and Pan-African vision, rejecting the ANC’s diverse racial vision of South Africa’s future.
Related Titles
By Maya Angelou
