Anne Moody's Autobiography Coming of Age in Mississippi Essay

As if growing up wasn't turbulent enough, Anne Moody grew up during a crucial time in American History. It was during this time that race and civil rights took center stage in her home state of Mississippi. Young women face many physical and emotional changes during their teenage years, regardless of when and where they grew up. However, for Anne Moody, and other young black women, there was the instability in race relations to deal with as well.

During the post-reconstruction era from 1877 to the mid-1960s, primarily southern and border states operated under a racial caste system referred to as Jim Crow. Not only did Jim Crow refer to anti-Black laws and restrictions such as Black codes and poll taxes; it was a way of life dominated by widely accepted societal rules that relegated Black people to the role of second class citizens. In the autobiography of Anne Moody entitled Coming of Age in Mississippi, Moody describes growing up as a poor Black woman in the rural south and eventually getting heavily involved with the Civil Right Movement during her college years. The detailing of her experiences expressed not only the injustices inflicted on Black people as a monolith by the Jim

In the book Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody, it shows about a Moody growing up in Mississippi poor and in the during Civil Rights era. Throughout the book it shows the experiences that Moody went through growing up and how they affected her views on the Civil Rights movements. First, during her childhood the experiences of growing up as an African-Americans in the southern limited Moody to what she can achieve in life. Then in the teenager years of Moody life the experiences are more against the hatred the white people had against the black community, also in her 20s her past experiences helped her get involved with Civil Rights programs. Finally, with her involvement in the Civil Rights movements affected her way see different views and resolves compared to other people. In the book, Moody’s experiences throughout her life affects her views and resolves during the Civil Rights movements and her involvement in the movement.

Anne Moody’s autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi, depicts the various stages of her life from childhood, to high school, then to college, and ends with her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. In the novel, Anne tells the reader her story through events, conversations, and emotional struggles. The reader can interpret various elements of cultural knowledge that Anne Moody learned from her family and community as a child. Her understanding of the culture and race relations of the time period was shaped by many forces. Anne Moody’s family, community, education, interactions with various races, and her experiences outside of her hometown, shaped her into a devout activist for equal rights. As a child, the most important

I feel that Anne Moody story is a blunt open description of how hard live was for Blacks.

     Moody was a very eager learner and constantly exceeded her classmates. She was an excellent student and though she far surpassed the performance of her white cousin, she was not considered to be equal, let alone superior. She did not let this affect her in any way. One word to describe Moody would be fighter, a fighter in what she believed to be fair and fighting to stand up for these beliefs. She always wanted to understand her surroundings and became very interested in the NAACP. Moody gets drawn into the fight for civil

As Moody grew up in the South, in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, she began to understand segregation on a larger context. Her work experiences tell us a lot about racial segregation and inequality. As work offered women new opportunities outside the house, it was different for African American women. They would work in trades least affected by mechanism, like domestic services, such as maids for white families. Moody and her mother both worked to help support the family and worked domestic service jobs. After Linda Mae moves away, Moody had to work somewhere to help support the family, so she worked for Mrs. Burke, even though she was very racist. Moody explains the reason she stuck with it and worked for Mrs. Burke, “I had to help secure that plate of beans” (Moody 116). Moody and African Americans a like, were working for more than just making

The first main event that I believe led to Anne Moody becoming an activist for Civil Rights was when she was younger, her cousin George Lee was babysitting and he burned down the house in a fit of rage and when Daddy gets home he blames it on Essie Mae (Anne Moody). This foreshadows all of life’s injustices that will be thrown her way. The next time was when she made friends with white neighbors and they decided to go to the movies, Anne couldn’t sit with her friends, she had to sit in the balcony with all of the other blacks. She did not understand why it was this way. Another event was when she was in high school, she changes her name to Anne Moody, and a white boy, whose name was Emmitt Till who was visiting from Chicago, whistled at a

Before this, Moody was under the impression that "Evil Spirits" were to blame for the mysterious deaths of African Americans, "Up until his death, I had heard of Negroes found floating in a river or dead somewhere with their bodies riddled with bullets . . . When I asked her (Mama) who killed the man and why, she said, ‘An Evil Spirit killed him. You gotta be a good girl or will kill you too.' So since I was seven, I had lived in fear of that ‘Evil Spirit.'" She became very upset and feared "being killed just because I was black. This was the worst of my fears." Moody eventually comes to learn about the NAACP and what they stood for, that this organization is trying to help improve the situation for African Americans like her. Unfortunately, when she tried to ask her mother about this she does not get any answers. Instead, her mother gets upset with her and asks her to never mention it around any white person. Moody felt frustrated that all these years that she had been sheltered from the truth and she felt dumb for never having opened her eyes to all the horror.

Coming of Age in Mississippi is an eye-opening testimony to the racism that exemplified what it was like to be an African American living in the south before and after the civil rights movements in the 50's and 60's. African Americans had been given voting and citizen rights, but did not and to a certain degree, still can not enjoy these rights. The southern economy that Anne Moody was born into in the 40's was one that was governed and ruled by a bunch of whites, many of which who very prejudice. This caused for a very hard up bringing for a young African American girl. Coming of Age in Mississippi broadened horizon of what it was like for African Americans to live during the 40's, 50', and 60's.

It was a violent sentiment, but Moody, more than half a century later, would have approved. She, too, faced a powerful establishment, and as it grew more violent, Moody grew more hateful of white people. She hated them because they hated black people.

     Anne Moody, like many other young people, joined the civil rights movement because they wanted to make a difference in their state. They wanted their freedom and the same rights as the white people had. Many other young people joined the civil rights movement because they felt that a change was needed in the way black people were treated. They felt that this change

Her entire time spent in Canton is met with little support, if not disgust, by whites as well as blacks. While the county is primarily black citizens, they still remain submissive to the white citizens in the area. This truly confuses and annoys Moody. She is looked upon with contempt by nearly all of the elder blacks, and can only seem to reach a small number of teenagers. This is when she privately realizes that if a change is to come, it has to come with the younger generations, not with the older. She again refers to the elder blacks as brainwashed and afraid to take what is theirs. The blacks in the county held nearly half the land, yet most were barely doing well enough to feed their families. She seems to initially think that the inferior thinking is only prominent in Centerville and Woodville, but when she realizes that this same mentality is present in Canton as well as all other parts of Mississippi, as well as New Orleans, this is only another nail in the coffin of her dream.

America during the 1960s was filled with change and progress. Although many embraced the changes occuring, there were still others who despised the change and fought for it to be stopped. With the civil rights movement in full swing, Coming of Age in Mississippi focuses on one girl’s story and how the movement gave her the power to change not only her situation in the world, but her beliefs on how the world worked. Anne Moody uses her autobiography in order to emphasize the importance of creating a path through the chaos of the world. She attempts to prove the necessity of the movement by explaining how racism in the South harshly affected not only individuals but whole communities and exemplifies the people in the movement who were brave enough

Coming of Age in Mississippi is an autobiography by Anne Moody. It is the story of a black girl growing up in Mississippi at a time when racial discrimination was taken for granted and the NAACP movement had no formal name. In her autobiography, Anne Moody displays the hardships of living in the "rural south" while the Negroes were just starting their fight for equality. Her story is amazing. Life was difficult for all poor Southerners. But for a poor black family with little hope and living with the constant threat of harm and loss of life, her optimism is awe-inspiring. I found this book to be very moving and easy to read, though the structure of her writing was very distracting.