Born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis in 1928, Maya Angelou was raised by her grandmother in segregated Arkansas from the ages of three to seven. Angelou was influenced at an early age by the work of writers like Shakespeare and Paul Laurence Dunbar. In the 1960s she was sought out by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to be the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization dedicated to using nonviolent protest to end racism and achieve civil rights for African Americans. In 1993, at the request of President Clinton, she wrote and read a poem for his inauguration. Angelou says the basic message in that poem is fundamental to all her work: "What I try to say is that as human beings we are more alike than we are unalike."