Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody

Robin Howe

Dr. Lorine Hughes

Minorities

4/10/06

Book Review: Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody

I chose to read this book in part to be educated about the personal experiences that Anne Moody went through growing up as a black in Southern Mississippi. Over the years, I have heard about the tough times that the black population went through during the past. This book brought it to the forefront of my mind.

This autobiography of Ms. Moody’s life was incredible. She begins the book with her own birth and the horrible ordeals that she was faced with throughout her entire life. When she was very young, her father left the family and the mother was forced to try to raise three children on her own. She recalls going days with only eating bread and on good days they were able to eat beans and bread. Her mother was doing odd jobs just so she could get money for food. One of the jobs that she did was picking up pecans from the ground for a white farmer. It just broke my heart to read about this and how her mother worked for twelve hours doing this and was only paid $1.50! Her mother eventually married man and continued throughout her life to have children that they couldn’t afford to have, but somehow scraped by. Ms. Moody’s stepfather was not happy that Anne and her two other siblings were from another man, so there was constant tension in their household. Ms. Moody eventually moved out at the age of seventeen and moved in with her natural father up until the day she graduated from high school.

Early in her life, Ms. Moody realized that she was going to have to look out for herself because no one else would. At the age of ten she was working as a maid for several different white families and was only being paid fifty cents a week! The three things that she found happiness in were school, basketball, and her church. She was the first one in her family to graduate from high school. She received a scholarship to attend Natchez College for her performance in basketball. After two years of attending Natchez she received a full scholarship, for her grades, at Tougaloo. She went on and graduated from Tougaloo in Biology. Again, she was the first person in her family to graduate from a college.

Throughout the entire book she talks about the horrible treatment that blacks received from the white communities in the South. I remember in one of our articles it talked about Emmett Till being murdered for the fact that he whistled at a white woman. This murder happened in Ms. Moody’s hometown. She was only around eleven when this happened. Even before that she was beginning to realize and not like the way how differently the blacks were being treated. “…the fear of being killed just because I was black. This was the worst of my fears” (p.132). How horrible is must be to feel that way at such a young age. She said that the NAACP tried to start an investigation into Till’s murder but never came up with anyone to convict. After this murder she stated, “I felt like the lowest animal on earth. At least when other animals (hogs, cow, etc.) were killed by man, they were used as food. But when man was butchered or killed by man, in the case of the Negroes by whites, they were left lying on a road or found floating in a river or something” (p.135). I can’t even imagine growing up around these circumstances. She also witnessed a house that was burnt to the ground with an entire family in it, just because there were rumors that a white man was taking care of a black woman and her children.

When she entered college, it was the beginning of the sixties. There were changes that were beginning around the South and she knew that she wanted to be a part of it. . She began working in different organizations such as the NAACP, CORE, and SNCC. She worked diligently trying to get black people to register to vote. This was a very difficult task. There were so many blacks that didn’t want to cause trouble because those who did register to vote were being fired from their jobs, receiving constant death threats, and were losing everything around them. In addition, many who worked for these organizations weren’t getting paid. Some of the full-time employees were only making ten dollars a week! During her time at Tougaloo, Medgar Evers would come to speak at the college and got many people active with the NAACP and tried to get things changed around Mississippi. Ms. Moody recalls in this book a sit-in she participated in, in which she and two other students (one black and one white) sat at the white-only counter at Woolworth’s and waited to be served. She recalls the tormenting and physical violence they all received, but they stood their ground and continued to get back