She also proudly fought for Civil Rights alongside Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Her internationally acclaimed memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was an account of strength and resilience that detailed how Angelou overcame sexual trauma and racism while growing up in the Jim Crow South.

The four groups of shaded squares in the grid are the TUMBLEWEEDs, and they are TUMBLing in two ways.Poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou would have been 90 years old today, and Google is celebrating her stunning legacy on its homepage with an animated doodle that features several celebrities reading her seminal poem 'Still I Rise.' The clip includes the voices of Alicia Keys, Oprah, Laverne Cox, Martina McBride, and America Ferrera, as well as a few lines read by Angelou herself and her son Guy Johnson.Īngelou, who died in 2014, was a prolific writer and the recipient of more than 30 honorary degrees. For me, it brought to mind the old western movies set in a desert town, complete with saloon showdowns and rough-and-tumble cowboys. Goldstein has brought it back in a fun and different way. The entry TUMBLEWEED, which is today’s revealer at 63A, has not appeared in the New York Times Crossword since 1978, but Ms. Note the spelling: If this clue were really about people who apply makeup, there would have been no hyphen.

“Make-up artists?” are LIARS, because they are skilled at making things up. It’s referring to the Kayak travel search engine, and an alternative to that would be EXPEDIA.Ģ7D. So “Kayak alternative” is not looking for anything like a canoe. It’s a veiled capital clue, which places the proper noun at the beginning in order to hide the fact that it would take a capital letter anyway. I haven’t used Kayak, so this one fooled me. The “Hexagon that borders two rectangles” is an oblique reference to UTAH, which neighbors the rectangular states of Wyoming and Colorado.ĢD.

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