Maya Angelou, Reclaiming Our Home Place

According to Angelou, the South and what it represents for African Americans has changed in the last one hundred years. Many African Americans made the move to the North a century ago with the dreams of making better lives for themselves. The North, to them, represented an opportunity to prosper away from the cotton fields of the South where their freedom had yet to be accepted. The North held the ideas of freedom and equality and offered the chance for a fresh start...a new life.
In reality for many African Americans, the promise of the North never materialized and the migration proved to be disappointing. Angelou suggests that African Americans did not realize it but they were in exile in the North, they were not rebuilding what had been damaged in the south but simply packing up and relocating to a place that needed no repairs because that to them represented a better life than one in the South. Angelou credits the Civil Rights Movement with changing the negative view of the South for African Americans, helping to heal those old wounds that they all shared. The belief system had changed in the South, segregation had ended and they could return to their roots and reclaim their history. For many African Americans the South began to represent their heritage. This is where their ancestors had fought to survive, this was their inheritance and they owed it to them to come back and reclaim it. There were bound to be the painful memories of the people who had suffered as a result of their race but it was up to them to use that struggle as a building block towards their future in the South.