The book ends movingly: on a bus with other civil rights workers. By the age of twenty-three, she was exhausted. Coming of Age in Mississippi The unforgettable memoir of a woman at the front lines of the civil rights movement-a harrowing account of black life in the. Along the way, she was beaten, jailed, and placed on the KKK's most wanted list she lived in fear for her life. Anne Moodys Coming to age in Mississippi illustrates how the economic, and social injustices and fears that plagued her childhood in the rural south.

Some old man in the crowd ordered the students to take us off the stools. She sat in at Woolworth's lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963 took part in demonstrations that brought an end to the more blatant forms of segregation and organized voter registration drives. The crowd began to chant, Communists, Communists, Communists. The last section of the autobiography recounts her Movement activities, important historical events. Intelligent and rebellious, Moody sought out information about the NAACP (from a high school teacher who subsequently was not rehired), and eventually became an active participant in the NAACP and CORE. Her black neighbors mourned their losses, but did nothing to actively protest what was happening to them. Lynchings, rapes, murders, and arson upheld legal segregation. A life of rural poverty (the first time Moody used an indoor toilet was in the home of a white woman) and the passive acceptance of a brutally racist, Jim Crow existence are spelled out in excruciating detail.

At age nine, Moody began to do the same kind of housework as her mother.

Her parents eventually separated, and her mother did domestic work for whites, living in housing they provided. The book has a powerful impact.īorn 'Essie Mae' in 1940, the oldest of nine children, Anne Moody lived with her parents, who worked as sharecroppers in Centreville, Mississippi. Her technique is anecdotal, with little commentary and no political analysis however, the effect of her stories is cumulative. In her autobiography, Anne Moody takes us from her earliest memories of poverty and racism in the 1940's to her involvement in what she calls 'The Movement.' She ends her story in 1964, burnt out both emotionally and politically.

Coming of age in mississippi