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Maya Angelou was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings broke open American literature in 1969. She lived through poverty, trauma, racism, and loss — and transformed every chapter of it into language of startling beauty and moral clarity. She delivered her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. She understood, from the inside, what it costs to keep a story locked away.

Stories are not decoration. They are how human beings make sense of what has happened to them and communicate it to others across time. On Tell a Story Day, this is an invitation to share something — around a dinner table, on a page, with a stranger. But layered against Freedom Day in South Africa, it takes on deeper weight: the stories of apartheid survivors, of the long walk to the ballot box, of what it meant to finally be counted. The untold stories that Angelou speaks of are not merely personal. Sometimes they are the stories of entire peoples. And their telling is the beginning of healing.