10 women travelers who broke all the rules

Maya Angelou

Despite a tough upbringing in the Jim Crow South, shuttled between relatives’ houses and surviving the harrowing trauma that inspired I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou was breaking barriers from a young age. At just sixteen, she became the first Black woman to work as a cable car conductor in San Francisco, and went on to work professionally as a dancer and singer – giving her an opportunity to travel internationally.

In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Angelou became active in the US Civil Rights movement, and at age 33 visited Egypt and moved to Ghana where she worked as a journalist and correspondent, and happened to meet Malcolm X. It’s this period she covers in her 1986 autobiography All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes, a memoir very much concerned with understanding her place in the African diaspora, what it means to travel as an African American woman, and what it means to return home. 

Source: https://bit.ly/3BoeWh5