In 1944, at the age of 16, Maya Angelou walked into Muni’s personnel department to ask for an application to become a streetcar conductor. She had moved to San Francisco from St. Louis with her mother, Vivian Baxter (described in today’s NYT obit as “beautiful and volatile”), and dropped out of high school two years earlier, and she had always admired the tailored uniforms the female streetcar conductors wore, outfitted with change dispensers on the front, and she thought to herself “that’s a job I want.”
via How Maya Angelou Became San Francisco’s First African-American Female Streetcar Conductor: SFist.




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