Human Dignity and Conscience in the Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Maya Angelou
At first glance, it seems like a very difficult task to find any real connection between the writings of Maya Angelou on the one hand and Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson on the other. After all, Emerson and Thoreau were Northern white men of the 19th Century who had never personally experienced the oppression of slavery of the type of segregation and inequality that Angelou grew up with in Stamps, Arkansas in the 1940s. Even though they both opposed slavery, and Thoreau was willing to defy the law and go to jail to uphold his principles, in the ...