One of the major challenges faced by civil rights leaders was

Probably the most difficult challenge the civil rights leader faced in her lifetime was the long healing process she went through after being raped by her mother's boyfriend at the age of seven; the man was later murdered by her uncles......... something she in turn felt responsible for. In response to the trauma Maya stopped speaking.

It would be five years before Maya would speak again, but during that time she acquired a love for language that would leave her studying the works of black authors like Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, as well as canonical works by William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe.

At the age of twelve and a half, Maya became the student of Mrs. Flowers. Mrs. Flowers was an educated black woman, and her work with Maya finally got her to speak again.