Welcome to the History Tricks where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

A warning, although we are not explicit at any time, we do mention violence, adult careers, and drug use.

So again, I think you need to preview this one before allowing the younger members of your household to listen. Thanks a lot.

Hello and welcome back to our coverage of Maya Angelou. This is part two. And before we dive in to the rest of her life, why don't we take a step back and give you a little refresher on what happened in part one.

Little Marguerite Johnson was raised mostly by her paternal grandmother in a very small Arkansas town. She lived through an assault and five years of silence after that assault until a very kind woman used poetry to heal the 12 year old.

She then moved to her mother's house in San Francisco, California. And after a visit to her father's house in San Diego, California, she lived on the streets for a couple of weeks until she was welcome back to the open arms of her mother.

How's that? It took us an hour the last time.

So 15 year old Maya is back from Mexico, but all is not awesome back at her mother's house. Brother Bailey and mother dear are at cross purposes. Shall we say and their disagreements lead Bailey to leave.

And I have to say Maya's flailing a little. Her rock, her friend is gone. She asked her mother if she could take a break from school and go to work. Well, your year ahead said mother and just like myself and just like Lauren Graham, no relation actress from the Gilmore girls, we feel like we had a bonus year.

You know, like almost like a year in the bank that you could spend privilessly or however you wanted and mother dear agreed. Maya though had purposely never taken typing and never taken shorthand because the simple reason she did not want to be shoehorned into any job that required shorthand or typing.

She did not want to work in a white lady's kitchen. Remember how that went with the purposeful dropping of the dishes and if she went to one of the local factories to do war work, they would require a birth certificate that prove she was 16 and as she was only 15. That was not to possibility.

But traveling around the city, she had realized that there were female cable car conductors. Now the fact that they were all white women didn't really occur to her and wasn't part of her thought process, but dang that uniform they were in that little changer on their belt. What a draw.

She went to her mom and she said, look, I'm going to take this semester off and I'm going to be a street car conductor and her mother instead of saying what that's the craziest thing ever. She said, OK, baby, make it happen because Vivian is this mother who's just trying to encourage her kids to do what they want to do.

Now this was 1943 and in the middle of World War II, so it was not the lady person part that startled the woman at the trolley office. It was the color of my skin. This receptionist tried every way from Sunday, as my grandmother would say, to get out of even letting Maya put in her application for weeks.

They were locked in this battle of wills and Maya just kept escalating it. First she just showed up at the office and they said no, the hiring managers in here and she left. But then she started staying and sitting there all day.

You know what is so cool about this mother, though, that Maya had mother made her a breakfast gave her lunch money and gave her car fair just as if she was really going to work to fight this battle.

And her mother just said she's really good with the like one liner. Well, nothing beats a trial, but a failure. So go ahead. Might not have had much faith that it would succeed, but she had to admire the persistence of a girl who would put herself through so much turmoil for this one thing.

Maya went to these African American associations and asked for help with the trolley company and they're like, we could get you a job that pays double that with no trouble.

Why are you so interested in this? And she's like, no, I will be a conductor at and no one will stop me and they're like, all right, goodbye.

So she did this on her own just by wearing people down and finally this receptionist said, okay, that's enough. I'm sick of seeing your face fill out an application. Here it is.

They gave her blood tests, interesting, Worshack tests. This is premires Briggs. It's kind of a personality test. I was looking at the Worshack test online, by the way. And I think I just would fail every single one. If you give uncommon answers that's concerning to them. And I did not pick the common answer for any of the cards.

Well, I would think that that would be a positive thing that you don't think like other people know it evidently not good. So you need to go. It's a butterfly.

...