Coming Of Age In Mississippi By Anne Moody

At this point, Anne found herself searching for answers. Not only about racial tensions but about her developing body. She was entering a new phase in her life, where

Cullen is hopeful to get to a place where people of different races will be able to look at others without prejudice and discrimination. However, the poem “Incident” is of a less positive tone. She expresses her experience in a shocked manner, saying, a boy stuck his “tongue out and, called, [her] ‘Nigger’,” (Cullen 8). She was so shocked that “From May until December; .../… of all the things that happened... /… that’s all [she could remember” in Baltimore (Cullen 10-12). At the young age that she was at, it is surprising and upsetting to her to be discriminated against for no reason.

Anne's was a life filled with significant events. The trial and home confinement of her father was the most significant of her childhood. The education she received from her father at this time would prepare her well for her own trial. She had a deep confidence in

Anne matures throughout the course of her diary entries, moving from detailed accounts of basic activities to deeper, more profound thoughts about humanity and her own personal nature. “I know what I want, I have a goal, an opinion, I have a religion and love. Let me be myself and then I am satisfied. I know that I’m a woman, a woman with inward strength and plenty of courage.” This shows that Anne matures through the course of her diary, she considers herself as a woman rather than a young girl and sets goals for herself that she wants to achieve. Anne becomes more optimistic even after she feels misunderstood by everyone and feels completely alone.

In 1619, when the first Africans were brought into Jamestown, Virginia to aid in the production of crops on the farms of Caucasian landowners, a period in our country’s dark history began, and with it a struggle for equality and freedom. For over 200 years, slavery consumed the United States, compelling blacks to long and later fight for the freedom their fair skinned counterparts had stripped from them. Decades later, the oppression of black rights marked the beginning of another struggle; one for basic rights that the black population had been denied. During these struggles, several names would come to mind for their achievements and efforts against racism and slavery, names like Frederick Douglass and Anne Moody. Frederick Douglass paved his own road to freedom while Anne Moody put her life on the line fighting for the rights that she knew she deserved. Although time frames apart, both Frederick Douglass and Anne Moody were able to resist and fight racism due to their thirst for knowledge, the help they extended towards other blacks, and their faith in succeeding despite previous failures.

2. One of the texts most focused on educating readers about race and the challenges it presents to American culture is Ida B. Wells’ “Lynch Law in All its Phases.” As discussed in previous reading responses, Wells’ speech is made up primarily of evidence due to the limitations placed on women of colors’ speech but even more so due to her “deep-seated conviction that the country at large does not know the extent to which lynch law prevails in parts of the Republic” (189). In this way, Wells endeavours to educate the US both about lynching and about the repercussions of allowing lynch law to prevail. That is, Wells forces audiences to acknowledge the fact that lynching, and thus white supremacy and racism, actively threaten the moral pillars that the United States is built on.

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

college. Even though she might have grown up with a hard life, she fought for different ways to

     Soon after Moody entered high school, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago, was killed for whistling at a white woman. After hearing about the murder, Moody realized she really did not know much about what was going on around her. ?Before Emmett Till?s murder, I had known the fear of hunger hell and the Devil but now there was a new fear known to me ? the fear of being killed just because I was black.? Moody?s response to this was asking her high school teacher, Mrs. Rice, about Emmett?s murder and the NAACP.

Marie developed an independent personality early on and rarely relied on her family for help. She was accustomed to collecting her school records from one school and enrolling her-self in the next school. A particular principle stands out in her memory, by looking at her records, which were from Texas, he told her that he was going to hold her back a year as the Texas school system was behind the Pennsylvania school system. This made Marie very angry because she sure didn’t want anyone to think she had failed. So she bargained with the principle, asking him to let her be in the grade she should be in and if she couldn’t do the work

Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi is a narrated autobiography depicting what it was like to grow up in the South as a poor African American female. Her autobiography takes us through her life journey beginning with her at the age of four all the way through to her adult years and her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. The book is divided into four periods: Childhood, High School, College and The Movement. Each of these periods represents the process by which she "came of age" with each stage and its experiences having an effect on her enlightenment. She illustrates how important the Civil Rights Movement was by detailing the economic, social, and racial injustices against African Americans she experienced.

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.

Ronita had returned to school, 2 years after Katrina, when she went into labor. The local schools, overwhelmed by thousands of children displaced from New Orleans did not welcome more students, especially with babies, and her help with her youngest brother was needed at home. She liked high school and had hoped to graduate, baby and all, but worried her mother and grandmother could not manage without her.

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.

She illustrates a vivid hate crime that occurred in her childhood that dealt with “KKK” members burning a cross on her lawn and trying to scare her family. She says “It seemed the angels had gathered, white men in their gowns. ”(Line 13) These men who took the time to gather around her house and burn a cross on her lawn, were racist and indecent people.