African Americans

Context

Today, Anne Moody is famous for two things: being one of the students who demanded service at the famous Woolworth’s lunch-counter sit-in in Jackson, Mississippi, and her autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi, which stands out as one of the classic autobiographies of American literature. Most leaders of the civil rights movement, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and W. E. B. Dubois, were middle-class or even wealthy. Moody is unique in being the direct voice of the most oppressed rural blacks.

African Americans had won their freedom in the Civil War and were guaranteed equal rights under new amendments to the Constitution. But when the federal government stopped enforcing the rule of law in the South, whites terrorized blacks into second-class citizenship. Using the Jim Crow laws, whites effectively barred blacks from voting, and almost all public facilities were segregated. Jim Crow was in effect throughout the time period of Coming of Age in Mississippi. As Moody tries to register voters, their applications are denied for a variety of pretenses, among them useless voting tests and archaic requirements.

Like most African Americans in the rural South before the civil rights movement, Moody’s family worked as sharecroppers. Sharecropping, also called “tenant farming,” entails a farmer renting the land on which he farms. Often, the rent is paid as either a percentage or fixed amount of the crop. Before the Civil War, sharecropping was the way many rural southern whites eked out a living. With the end of slavery, most ex-slaves simply became sharecroppers, often on the same plantation on which they had worked as slaves. Academics have argued that in economic terms, sharecropping can be as exploitative as slavery, since the landowner risks nothing if there is a bad crop.

In 1968, when Coming of Age in Mississippi was released, critics tended to focus less on the book’s value as a work of literature,