Ann Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi - Essay Example

Civil rights activist Anne Moody was born in rural Wilkinson County, Mississippi on September 15, 1940. Although she published a collection of short stories entitled Mr. Death in 1975, it is her autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi for which she is most recognized. The 1969 book is an account of her youth in rural Mississippi growing up on a plantation as a child of sharecroppers, followed by her work as civil rights activist and eventual flight from the South. While at Tougaloo College she worked with the NAACP, CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), culminating in her personal involvement in the integration of Woolworths lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi. Eventually Coming of Age also gives the reader an indication of the motivations for the authors turn toward militancy and her eventual move to New York City, where she now resides. The author deftly draws for the reader a searing and compelling autobiographical perspective of what life was like for her in the rural Deep South during the nineteen forties and fifties, when she was growing up. It also gives a birds-eye view of the civil rights movement of the early nineteen sixties. Written by Ms. Moody when she was twenty eight, it is a damning portrait of what life was like for African-Americans in the Deep South. In the Coming of Age in Mississippi, she depicts what it was like to grow up in the South as a poor African American. Instead of focusing the book on the years she spent in the civil rights movement, she chose to start from when she was a child at age four. Narrating her life throughout the book, Moody illustrates why the civil rights movement was such a necessity by exemplifying the physical, economic, and social racial injustices that took place in society from the beginning of her childhood to her action in the movement for civil rights. Moody grew up with her mother, her father, her sister Adline, and her brother Junior on a plantation as sharecroppers of land owned by a white man named Mr. Carter. Moody’s parents separated when her father left her mother for another woman, leaving Moody’s mother alone to raise the kids. It tells of parallel lifestyles that were preordained and dependent upon whether one were black or one were white. If one were black, one was destined to a lifetime of poverty, because job opportunities were limited to bottom of the rung jobs with no opportunity for growth and which were designed by their very nature to keep one subservient. It tells of schools so substandard as to make one non-competitive in the larger world. It tells of dilapidated and ramshackle housing without indoor plumbing that was the lot of many blacks in the rural south. It describes the fear that was palpable in ones every day life, if one were black; a fear of making a white person angry, because the consequences that would follow could end up costing one dearly. It sums up the daily indignities which were a part of growing up black in the rural south in the mid twentieth century. It is a story of frustration and anger at the inequities found in every day living. It is the story of how one young woman dealt with that system and survived to become a civil rights activist at a time when to be such was tantamount to asking for trouble of a deadly nature. Well told and deftly drawn, the author conveys a real sense of the times in which she grew up. She ably captures an era in America that should not be forgotten; if only to remind the reader that it was not that long ago that some Americans were treated like second class citizens. Unfortunately, despite best intentions, some still are, though it is now done in more covert, rather than overt, fashion. We, as Americans, may have come a long way, but we still have a ways to go in eliminating the inequities which still exist in our society. Ms. Moodys autobiography serves to remind us that the past was not all that long ago and, in some measure, is still with us today. Blunt, powerful, and angry, Coming of Age in Mississippi dares the reader to find anything poetic in the lives of black people living in rural Mississippi in the 1940s and 50s, "where they knew, as I knew, the price you pay daily for being black." Anne Moody begins with her childhood - houses papered with newspaper, children left alone because parents have to work, her own after-school housecleaning jobs that begin at the age of nine so she can help her family eat. Smart and athletic, she earns scholarships through college, but her thoughts are increasingly consumed by the racism that surrounds her. She is one of the original protestors at the Woolworths counter in Jackson; after college she helps lead a voter registration drive in rural Canton, Mississippi, "where Negroes frequently turned up dead." She describes finding her own name on a Klan "wanted" list, seeing a boy beaten as FBI agents watch from across the street, hearing of murders - Emmet Till, Medgar Evars, John F. Kennedy, her own uncle. She lives her life knowing she can no longer return safely to her hometown and feeling estranged from family members who do not share her passionate commitment to fight racism. She is easy on no one, not even Martin Luther King, whose non-violent stance she eventually questions. Anne Moodys book, written when she was twenty-eight, is both proof of her convictions and a forthright testament to the sacrifices, terror, and courage that made up the U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. As quoted in the book Coming of Age in Mississippi, "In the beginning, I never really saw myself as a writer. I was first and foremost an activist in the civil rights movement in Mississippi. When I could no longer see that anything was being accomplished by our work there, I left and went north. I came to see through my writing that no matter how hard we in the Movement worked, nothing seemed to change; that we made a few visible little gains, yet at the root, things always remained the same; and that the Movement was not in control of its destiny — nor did we have any means of controlling its destiny." Anne Moodys Coming of Age in Mississippi gives the reader a better appreciation of the struggles and hardships people went through and overcame just to have some basic rights. REFERENCES Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi. Laurel, 1992 Read More