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Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Classic Autobiography of a Young Black Girl in the Rural South

anne moody

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Born to a poor couple who were tenant farmers on a plantation in Mississippi, Anne Moody lived through some of the most dangerous days of the pre-civil rights era in the South. The week before she began high school came the news of Emmet Till's lynching. Before then, she had "known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was...the fear of being killed just because I was black." In that moment was born the passion for freedom and justice that would change her life.

An all-A student whose dream of going to college is realized when she wins a basketball scholarship, she finally dares to join the NAACP in her junior year. Through the NAACP and later through CORE and SNCC she has first-hand experience of the demonstrations and sit-ins that were the mainstay of the civil rights movement, and the arrests and jailings, the shotguns, fire hoses, police dogs, billy clubs and deadly force that were used to destroy it.

A deeply personal story but also a portrait of a turning point in our nation's destiny, this autobiography lets us see history in the making, through the eyes of one of the footsoldiers in the civil rights movement.

424 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1968
Places
the united states of america, 

This edition

Format
424 pages, Paperback
Published
February 3, 2004 by Delta
ISBN
9780385337816
ASIN
0385337817
Language
English

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About the author

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anne moody

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Anne Moody was an American author who wrote about her experiences growing up poor and Black in rural Mississippi and her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement through the NAACP, CORE, and SNCC. Raised in Centreville, Mississippi, she was the oldest of eight children and began working for white families at a young age while excelling in school. She attended Natchez Junior College on a basketball scholarship before transferring to Tougaloo College, where she became deeply involved in civil rights activism.
As a student, Moody participated in protests, including the infamous Woolworth's lunch counter sit-in in Jackson, where she and fellow activists endured violent attacks from a hostile crowd. She worked for CORE during the Freedom Summer of 1964 and was arrested for her participation in demonstrations.
In 1968, she published Coming of Age in Mississippi, an acclaimed autobiography that vividly depicted the realities of racism and segregation in the South. The book received widespread recognition, including awards from the National Council of Christians and Jews and the National Library Association. She later wrote Mr. Death: Four Stories in 1975, a collection of short stories exploring themes of mortality.
Moody lived in New York for much of her life, working outside the literary spotlight and largely avoiding public appearances. She briefly lived in Berlin in the early 1970s and later returned to Mississippi in the 1990s. Though she continued writing, many of her later works remain unpublished. Her contributions to literature and civil rights activism remain an essential part of American history.

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Rating(4 / 5.0, 99 votes)
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99 reviews All reviews
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Fyrebirdi
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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As much as I respect Anne Moody and all that she accomplished and experienced in her life, this autobiography didn't really touch my heart or my soul in any way. Perhaps Moody is stoic by nature, I don't know. To be fair, I also blame the writing. Moody writes in a very systematic, detached, expressionless style that made it difficult for me to feel what she's feeling or to do more than sympathize for a few moments before I was forced to move on to the next notable event in her life. This book reads almost like a text book. It was missing the personal touches of emotion that I expected from a book like this.

I also found it strange that, despite having 6-8 siblings, Moody hardly mentions any of them throughout her childhood, high school, or college years. We barely get a glimpse of Adline and Junior (Moody's real siblings) and that too, only when Anne is 23 and grown. I don't know, I just wasn't as impressed with this autobiography as I expected to be.

Last semester we read The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara for our history class and I liked it... more than I thought I would. It was emotional and sentimental and heartbreaking... I guess I just wanted to be moved by this story. I kept waiting for the emotions to hit me, but they never did.
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TimeStopSamurai
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I finished this book a few days ago and have really thought a lot about what to say. I have such mixed feelings. It was good enough to hold my interest, but about 3/4 of the way through I grew weary of what I perceived as near constant whining.

Anne deserves so much credit for her bravery during the civil rights movement. A part of the infamous Woolworth sit in at the lunch counter wherein she and her fellow protesters sat at what was then an all white lunch counter. Refusing to leave, they suffered verbal and physical abuse. Anne was arrested throughout her career in civil rights protests and she deserves much credit for thousands of hours of trying to canvas black neighborhoods in the hope of increasing voter registration.

Dirt poor as a child, her parents separated and times were very tough. At an early age, she helped support her family by doing various domestic work. She was indeed a very spunky, tough self reliant person.

My fault with the book is the repetitive negativity. It seems that Anne has quite a huge chip on her shoulder, not just regarding white people, but blacks as well. And, many times she comes across as a know it all. Even her assessment of Dr. Martin Luther King's I Had a Dream Speech seemed derogatory.

While I can admire her accomplishments and her fortitude, I also think she had some severe issues of inability to look at herself in relation to her negative comments and actions of others.

I started out very interested in her story and her depiction in all terrible atrocities of southern whites and their treatment of blacks. I can only imagine what it was like to live in this terrible period of history.

However, as I finished the book, I truly wish I could have liked her more.
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RyuiZaya
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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4.5
I cannot express how important this book is to read to understand history. This was a fantastic read and I wish I had more time to leisurely read it and soak up more details. Moody kept me on my toes and is a fantastic storyteller. It’s a shame she never wrote another novel.

“If you want to know the truth, read black women authors.” —Amanda Johnson
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Piper_charms
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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When I was an undergrad, all my professors assumed someone else had already assigned this book to me, and as a result, I never read. I'm glad I finally did, though, as its a really telling firsthand account of what it meant to grow up poor and Black girl in rural Mississippi as the Civil Rights Movement gained steam.
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Malyar_Feyzullah
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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This was a very compelling memoir. I kept getting lost in it because of Moody's direct and descriptive writing style. Moody was an important member of the Civil Rights movement in the Deep South. Many of the things she was writing about in 1968 are still happening in the States.

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SilentMuse
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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You'll be emotional from page one to page done. Here is a snippet of my review on Grab the Lapels:

Moody’s book also taught me details of the Civil Rights Movement of which I was not aware, even though I’ve studied and taught the time period. For instance, when a house full of activists hear through the grapevine that a group of whites are going to kill them that night and block all the roads out of town, the young men and women lay out in the yard all night in long grass. It’s wet, hard, and they’re all shaking in terror. I felt like I was there with them. Moody’s family also turns on her quickly so they won’t be killed. Her favorite grandma treats her like a stranger. Later, I learned that in one town where Moody leads a group of activists that black people have most of the land and make up most of the population. However, land and crop contracts are only given to white farmers, so the black farmers sit on cropless land and nearly starve to death. Furthermore, I knew that activists were constantly arrested, but Moody explains that they were packed into a truck and locked in, after which the driver would crank up the heat on a 100+ degree day and leave them in their for hours until people freaked out or nearly died. When a headless black body is found, the colleges do room checks to see if it’s one of their students. The Klan shared pamphlets door-to-door with a blacklist of certain people (Moody’s picture appears on their list). This is the stuff you don’t get in your history textbook.
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Calcar
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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You know, just when you think you have read all of the books that seem to fall into the category of racism in the South, you come across something like this, that blows the idea that you can't read anymore out of the water. This is so well written, I could not put it down. Very different than many similar books, this is a must read, especially for life writing scholars and lovers alike.
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