I knew nothing about this book before I randomly picked it off the shelf at the library...

...But I'm pleasantly surprised that it's an easy and interesting read. As Moody matter-of-factly recounts her childhood experiences in the deep south, starting from age six or so; as her understanding of her environment grows, so does her discontent, idealism and determination to work for change.

Portions devoted to describing how her own physical beauty, intelligence, courage and athletic skill was greater than those around her seem out of place and unnecessary, but this is an autobiography, so the author can tell her own story as she pleases.

The book ends in 1964, at a point when Moody finds herself exhausted and struggling with fatalism after several years of involvement with the Civil Rights Movement. She is swept up with a crowd and onto a bus headed for Washington, D.C. As they sing "We Shall Overcome," she despairingly wonders if there is any truth in the lyrics.

Forty years later, I sometimes feel the same way. It is difficult to believe such an environment as 1960s Mississippi ever existed, and it is sad to see some of the same layers of racism, sexism, and (more than the others) the culture of poverty that remain all over the U.S.

Really good but the beginning was super slow

A childhood classic for me.

This is an important document speaking to a time not that long ago and in many ways still with us. Moody writes in a colloquial style I’m glad the publisher didn’t force her to change, such as her use of “Mama them” (instead of 'Mama and them').

The memoir is set out in four parts: Childhood, High School, College, and The Movement. She must’ve had a good memory, because even her youngest days in Centreville are rendered in vivid detail. As someone I know suggested, perhaps she had a photographic memory: She did that well in school, even while keeping every minute of her days busy: working in the fields, or after school and on the weekends for white families; taking piano lessons; being active in her church; playing basketball for her high school and college teams. Though she got discouraged and sometimes gave up, she was driven to be the best at whatever she did. When she’s a teenager, Emmett Till is murdered and, for the first time, she realizes she could be killed “just because I was black.” Before she graduates from high school, she moves out of her mother’s home to get away from her stepfather and is mostly on her own from that moment on.

She’s a student at Tougaloo when she joins the Movement. I was reminded of John Lewis discovering his own purpose within the same cause. Though the time period and some of the people involved overlap, Moody’s memoir is different from Lewis’ Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement; for only one thing, she doesn’t go into the philosophy, or even any training she may have had, of non-violence, though she participates in the Jackson Woolworth’s sit-in. (That’s her in in the famous photograph by Fred Blackwell.) Later she wonders if non-violence, which she considers merely a tactic, is no longer useful. Lewis is not mentioned in her account, but I know they would’ve disagreed on that point. As to the split among the Movement’s various groups, Moody blames the (white) newspapers for sowing the dissension. She attends the D.C. March, the one of MLK’s famous speech, and is dismayed at all the talk of “dreaming.”

Once she realizes, she says, that white people who would kill to keep their “way of life” are sick, she no longer hates them. The sentiment reminded me of Lewis, but with Moody you don’t sense that feeling stayed with her, though it’s more than understandable it might not have. After all the terror and violence, including the murder of her uncle in Woodville (the description of which brought tears to my eyes), it’s no wonder she suffered a few “breakdowns.” At one point she leaves Canton, Mississippi, where she has worked so hard and endured so much, to live in New Orleans with her sister. The respite is short-lived. Despite the rest she needs, she is too much a (young) woman of action. By the end of her account, she’s not necessarily optimistic; but she's on her way back to D.C. to “testify” -- and she's not yet twenty-four years old.

Coming of Age in Mississippi, the autobiography of Anne Moody is a long journey full of coincidental brushes with many moments that have shaped American history during the Civil Rights Movement. As such, Anne Moody’s story symbolically stands as evidence that there would have been no “movement” without the millions of people who marched, protested, and fought for their rights. Later in the book, Anne remarks about a march in Washington that drew millions of people; she was surprised to find she had “dreamers” instead of “leaders” in the movement. This was an obvious reference to Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream,” which forces the reader to individually consider the various viewpoints of each person we have seen featured staring at MLK from the crowd the day he gave the speech. Maybe, you can try and dismiss Anne’s sentiment as unique, but her involvement in SNCC and college places her squarely among the people you would expect to follow MLK’s every word.

Moody, starts her story as a young child growing up. As she grows older, more mature and more knowledgeable her diction changes as well. It was a pleasant detail to examine once she was an adult. She tells her story in a very “matter the fact” manner devoid of most figurative language accept when used in dialogue. It is also very interesting to note how afraid she was at speaking up as a child. Considering her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement later in life, I assumed she would have always been outspoken. As Moody grows older she makes many hard decisions despite the danger, alienation, and disapproval she would meet with.

I must admit, that the book offers an abundance of mundane details about her life which can only be appreciated by considering the path from cowardice to bravery. In considering this question, the comments about indoor plumbing, moving from home to home, job to job, new clothes to old clothes, and organizations to organization becomes the unexpected proving grounds for a courageous critical woman.

This was a pretty remarkable book, one that truly grows on you as you follow Annie Moody through her life. What works about Coming Of Age is the juxtaposition of writing style and storyline. Moody lets her story unfold using an unsentimental, no-nonsense tone. While her early years growing up in a small rural Mississippi town in the '40s were not marked by violence, the early stirrings of the Civil Rights movement prompted a rapid and ruthless white repression of black civil rights. The spare nature of her prose made the frustrations and hopelessness of Civil Rights Workers and average black folks all the more poignant.

This was the kind of book that should be required reading for any American, especially considering the truly vile racism that this year's election has unearthed in some of those "pro-America" parts of our country - and, sadly, in some blue states, too.

I was curious to read this book. Born white and working class in the Midwest in 1962, the Civil Rights struggle didn't really affect me personally, and we heard little about it. "Demonstrations" and sit-ins were held in other places--pretty far away, when you live in a small rural town. It was something "college kids" did on weekends "to make trouble" according to my southern-born father. I never saw a black person close enough to speak to until I was in middle school. There simply weren't any around where I lived. On the surface, her experience would appear alien to anything I lived.

However, Anne Moody tells her story in a way I could relate to: feeling like an outsider in her own family, deeply marked by poverty and emotional isolation growing up. She desperately wants her family to be a supportive network, but unfortunately it isn't; her father and mother split when she is a small child, and her mother's common-law husband dislikes Moody. I wonder, though, about the passages that describe how he turned against her when she was in her teens. Did he really not touch her? As an abuse survivor myself, my inner radar tingled when reading these passages; perhaps she wrote it this way to avoid hurting her mother? That's what it seemed like to me. Even her extended family (grandmother, aunts etc) tend to turn away from her, seeing her as a "troublemaker" or simply unreasonable in her demands for a different life. She is, after all, black and a woman in 1950s Mississippi (and later New Orleans). For the adults around her, her expectations can reach no farther than domestic service, marriage (or not) and babies.

No wonder, then, that Moody threw herself heart and soul into the Civil Rights Movement. She needed a cause, a purpose to her life that could make her feel she was making a difference, not just for herself but for the larger community. The people involved in the Movement become her "family", as described toward the end of the narrative, providing what little support she had. The end of her story feels cut short, as the members of her cell join others on the way to another march, but by this time Moody's physical and emotional health were flagging after months of short food and sleep and overexertion. She felt jaded and cynical, and then berated herself with feelings of guilt--guilt that her efforts weren't making a difference to the beatings and killings, and guilt that she was so tired she just wanted to quit. But where could she go but on?

The narrative ends with the phrase: "I wonder. I wonder."

So do I.

Ms. Moody was one of the original Civil Rights activists and was seated at the lunch counter during one of the first protests, in the Woolworth’s in Jackson, MS. The book covers two years of her organizing efforts with the NAACP, SNCC, and CORE. But the majority of her memoir details what it was like to grow up poor and black, the eldest of nine children of a sharecropper mother. Moody was a brilliant child and found her own way, with little help, to college. This is an important history, published in 1968, within four years of the events it chronicles.

Wow! Amazing, tragic, heart warming and righteous. Really helps you understand what the Front lines of the freedom movement went through.

An outstanding autobiography of a young African American girl growing up in the segregated deep South, and her journey to action in the Civil Rights Movement.

No matter how much you know of the general disaster that was the Jim Crow South, there is nothing like seeing it through the eyes of someone who was born into it, realized it, faced it, struggled against it, and worked to make a difference. If you haven't read something like this, I strongly recommend you add this to your reading list. It isn't ancient history -- it is OUR history.

I realized most of the way through the book that it didn't become a "can't put it down" page-turner for me until Anne went to college. But then it occurred to me why that was: early in her life, Anne is reporting what happened to her, but by late high school and college, she was making choices about her life. And that's the kind of thing that gets me going!

When my civil rights movement professor asked for our thoughts on the book, one of my classmates expressed his disappointment with how depressing it was. I argued with him that most history books are depressing, and that at least with an autobiography we get moments of Black joy (such as Moody being crowned homecoming queen) that are left out of traditional textbooks. Coming of Age redeemed the autobiography genre for me.

This is one of those books that makes you feel and think, so if you are looking for a light read, this isn't it. I enjoyed it very much and kept the copy on my permanent bookshelf.