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.

These lines open Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise,” written in the context of post–Civil Rights–era Black feminist assertion and Angelou’s broader literary project of testifying to Black history, survival, and dignity. Angelou (1928–2014) drew on personal experience with racism, sexism, and trauma, as well as on African American oral traditions, spirituals, and blues-inflected cadence. The poem addresses an unnamed oppressor—readable as both individual and systemic—who attempts to control the speaker through historical distortion (“write me down in history”) and humiliation. Angelou’s refrain of rising frames resilience as both personal triumph and collective inheritance.

The speaker confronts the way power shapes “history” through slander and erasure, insisting that such narratives cannot ultimately determine her worth. Images of being “trod…in the very dirt” evoke degradation and attempted subjugation, while the simile “like dust, I’ll rise” turns the most ordinary substance into a force of inevitability: dust returns, lifts, and cannot be permanently suppressed. The stanza establishes the poem’s central argument that survival is not merely endurance but a defiant reappearance—an insistence on visibility, self-definition, and joy despite oppression. It also signals a collective voice, resonating beyond one life to a people repeatedly pushed down yet persistently rising.

1) “You may write me down in history / With your bitter, twisted lies, / You may tread me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”
2) “You may write me down in history / With your bitter, twisted lies… But still, like dust, I rise.”