A review by berylbird
Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Classic Autobiography of a Young Black Girl in the Rural South by Anne Moody

challenging emotional informative inspiring sad tense medium-paced

3.5

 

An exploration of growing up as a young Black girl in Mississippi, Anne Moody recounts her life with raw facts and unflinching emotion.  The details of Moody’s life are revelatory regarding the harsh disparity between blacks and whites in economics, education, and the justice system.

Moody was born in 1940; Emmet Till in 1941.  Moody talks about the shock waves of anger and fear that reverberated through Black communities when Till’s murder occurs in 1955.  At the time, she is working for a white woman who tells her, “He was killed because he got out of place with a white woman.  A boy from Mississippi would have known better.  This boy was from Chicago.”  Moody says this brought into her life a new fear of “being killed just because I was black.”  Moody is fifteen years old and for the first time, she not only deals with this new fear, but also begins to experience hate.  She writes, “I hated all the other whites who were responsible for the countless murders Mrs. Rice had told me about..”

Mississippi was one of the most repressive states for blacks in the Jim Crow south.  539 lynchings are recorded between the end of Reconstruction and the 1960s.  Mississippi didn’t have as many Jim Crow laws as other states because they weren’t needed.  Force of custom maintained things as whites dictated according to ‘American Radio Works’ report, A State of Siege, Mississippi:  A Place Apart.

Anne Moody’s account is invaluable as it shows what was happening during important moments of the Civil Rights Movement.  She was a participant in the sit-in at Woolworth’s in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963.  The cruelty and inhumanity of whites as they resisted this attempt of black students and faculty from Tougaloo College making a statement that they deserved service in the whites section of the diner is mind-blowing.  Mustard, ketchup, scalding coffee, beatings, curses, horrible denigrations, and intermittent assaults occurred, all while police looked on.  It’s hard to imagine the kind of courage it would have taken to withstand this kind of abuse for hours.  This incident and other civil action demonstrations began to let people across the US and around the world know the truth about how blacks were being treated in Mississippi and across much of the south.  

The tide was being turned and young black people like Anne Moody were at the forefront, sometimes at great cost.  Moody was on the verge of collapse from the mental, emotional, and physical strain at different junctures in her fight for equal rights. 

For the most part, Anne Moody seems self-aware, intelligent, and driven for the Movement.  Her mother warns her to stay away from her home community where her name is on the Klan blacklist.  She lived and worked intermittently  in New Orleans and met family members there, but fear kept her from returning to her home community for many years.  Much of her Civil Rights work takes place in Canton, Mississippi.  

I would have liked to know more about Moody’s feelings/emotions as they occurred.  I did learn some of them as she neared collapse, but it felt very surface, not as deep and reflective as I would have wished.  I lost some interest toward the end of the book, and I think the constant reporting of protests and meetings added to this.  Moody was a plucky and determined warrior and deserves to be remembered for her contributions to the Civil Rights Movement.  Having her first hand account made this a worthwhile read.