Marguerite Anne Johnson, better known as Maya Angelou, was born on April 4, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. She was born and raised during a time marked by the Great Depression and World War I. When her parents divorced at a young age, she and her brother were sent to live with her grandmother in highly racially segregated Stamps, Arkansas. She found comfort in her brother, Bailey, during difficult times in the South. This segregation was severe at that time, especially for the shy young Marguerite. Throughout her childhood, she was sent from her grandmother to her father and mother. All of these different environments exposed Angelou to a range of experiences, including: racism, segregation, music, and politics. These experiences are likely what pushed her to chronicle her life through autobiographical works as well as poems. In these works, Angelou uses elements such as literary devices, poetic devices, allusions, recurring themes and symbols to represent. In her later works, she uses these devices to depict the life of the black woman evolving from this life and becoming free. The places Maya lived during her childhood contributed to her identity, her displacement, and motivated her to write about this topic in the future. In Stamps, Arkansas, raised by her religious grandmother or "Mama Henderson", her love of God began, also explaining her many biblical allusions. Overall, this African American love of religion gave them an outlet from the suffering and pain of segregation and depression that were all too common. In Stamps, Angelou was exposed to this segregation, she even mentioned that she didn't believe white people were people (p.) because her side of town had never seen them. (commentary) The