Angelou's speech focused on the idea of acting as a "light" on another's life to change that person's life, and even the world, for the better. She told stories of people who she considered to be lights on her own life, every so often singing, "This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine."
She spoke of her Uncle Willy, who helped raise her and taught her many things, even though he had been paralyzed since childhood due to a neurological disorder.
After his death several years ago, she said she returned to her hometown in Arkansas for the funeral and learned that he had touched many other people's lives as well, including one who went on to become the first black mayor of Little Rock and another who became a state legislator.
"I had no idea the range of light he shone," she said, before singing a song she wrote for him.
"I encourage you to look at who has been a light for you. Look and cherish and respect, and if you have a chance, go to that person and say thank you."
She also touched on racial issues in her stories, relating to the audience her experiences as a black woman growing up in a small town in Arkansas.
"Imagine it: a black girl from a little village in the South who became whatever people think Maya Angelou is," she said.
Speaking with the wisdom of her 75 years, she said that all people should ask more of themselves and believe they can achieve anything that is humanly possible.
"I am a human being; nothing human can be alien to me," she said, quoting Terence, an African slave who became a Roman playwright in the second century B.C.
She apologized to the audience, which was composed of mostly students, for the state of the world today.
"When I see you young people, I am ashamed of the world we have brought to you," she said. "I am sorry we are handing you a world so full of blood and guts and greediness. But here it is. It's your world, and you do have a chance to turn it around."
But she kept the tone of her speech on the lighter side by telling amusing anecdotes, such as when people approach her in airports and ask her to touch their children.
"They hand me their babies, without even thinking their babies might need to be changed," she said with a deep laugh that made the audience chuckle even harder.
A little while later she said, "I don't trust people who don't laugh."
She closed her hour-long speech by reading her poem "A Brave and Startling Truth," which she wrote and delivered in honor of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations in 1995.
However, her final words to the audience were the same words that opened and interspersed her speech: "This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine."
"Wow," Melanie Ragin (graduate-immunology) said of Angelou's speech. "It was prolific, profound -- it was just great."
Ragin's friend Caleph Wilson (graduate-pathobiology) agreed.
"It was like a religious experience," he said.
Lauren Domanico (freshman-elementary education) said she thought Angelou's speech covered topics that were important to the audience.
"It was very powerful," she said. "It really touched me."
