Nyong'o: Poet Angelou’s contribution to the civil rights movement unforgettable

The Civil Rights Movement was then beginning to fade into the past. Politics in the US was dominated by the war in Vietnam and Richard Nixon was making a desperate attempt to convince Americans that he could pull the troops out of Vietnam and claim victory at the same time. The year was 1972.

His Secretary of State, the professor of history from Harvard, Henry Kissinger, with his baritone voice booming from television channels almost every night, was a good messenger who could ward off attacks from the Democrats as he engaged Le Duc Tho in the Geneva peace negotiations which were as dodgy as the guerilla war itself, was in the muddy thickets in South Vietnam.