Google celebrated Maya Angelou’s birthday Wednesday (April 4) with a special homepage Doodle that opens as a video of celebrities reciting lines from Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise.”
The Doodle is especially fitting considering April is also National Poetry Month. Maya Angelou would have been 90 years old. She passed away in 2014 at the age of 86. ]
The video opens with Angelou reading lines from “Still I Rise.” Check out the rest of the celebrities who celebrated Angelou’s birthday on Wednesday.
Dr. Maya Angelou
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust,
I’ll rise.
Alicia Keys
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
America Ferrera
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I rise.
Dr. Maya Angelou
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Martina McBride
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.
Guy Johnson
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise
Laverne Cox
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Oprah Winfrey
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Dr. Maya Angelou
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.