New Delhi, March 24 -- "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time," poet Maya Angelou, ha uttered these words in conversation with Oprah Winfrey, during The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1997. Maya Angelou was, at her core, a witness. She observed the world, its cruelty, its beauty, its contradictions, and transformed what she saw into language that outlasted the moment it described. The writer and the activist were never really separate in her. The writing was the activism. The poetry was the protest.

Maya Angelou said these words during a candid televised conversation with Oprah Winfrey in 1997 - one of many deeply personal exchanges the two women shared over the course of their decades-long friendship. The context was h...