Had to read for class, overall surprisingly good!

Really good. She was part of the Woolworth counter sit-in and did a lot of civil rights work in Mississippi, and she's an excellent writer.

3.5 stars

Love Anne Moody's fierceness. I feel like we sometimes idealize activists in society without realizing that they too have doubts and flaws. Moody's memoir blends strength and vulnerability, showcasing her thirst for change as well as the frustrations she faced as a poor black woman who grew up in the south. I appreciated reading about the development of her passion for activism and her experiences working with racial justice groups such as SNCC, NAACP, and CORE. Above all else, Moody's personality shines: an unapologetic, motivated spirit who works to get what she wants, no matter which boy or bigot stands in her way.

While the first 200-250 pages of Coming of Age in Mississippi felt discursive and muddled, I would still recommend this book to anyone interested in civil rights, coming of age tales, or memoirs written by people of color. What Moody lacks in finesse, she makes up for in conviction.

This book was a reminder of the struggles black people went through in the south of America. She touched on many issues that are still going on today and how racism fostered her anger to fight for a better tomorrow. It never got boring and made me ask more questions.

My recollection of this book is that while it's a good recounting of growing up the Jim Crow South, Moody is so goddamned full of herself that it's hard to get past that to see your way through the interesting and important parts of the book. A good portion of the book is taken up with accounts of Moody's beauty (a lot on that topic), bravery, intelligence, industriousness, political acumen, blah blah blah. And of course, to hear her tell it, no one around her is quite as smart and on-the-ball as she is. I came away with the distinct impression that the civil rights movement would never have gotten off the ground at all without Anne Moody as a mover and shaker behind it.

In fairness, I read this book a long time ago now, and should probably give it another try.

A must read.

I read this on right after "The Blood of Emmett Till." It is hard to imagine the conditions in the Jim Crow South. This memoir shows how the cruelty and violence were perpetrated on all levels-- by individuals, by groups, by institutions. For those expecting a scholarly history this is not. It is a memoir of Anne Moody and her experiences as a child through college and her significant role in "The Movement".

Her parents were sharecroppers who picking cotton while she her baby sister are "babysat" by an abusive 8-year-old. She spends her childhood moving from shack to shack, eating not much besides beans, and working hard every time she gets a chance, for very little reward. She somehow grows up to be a really good student and is lucky enough to attend college. During college she becomes involved with the NAACP and SNCC becoming a leader in both. This is a painful read both as to her personal struggles but the larger conditions of the day.

She was one of those student who participated in the lunch counter sit-ins and food and condiments smeared into her hair by laughing young white racists. But it wasn't just idiot young bigots that harassed them. The police called into protect them sometimes participated in the harassment by letting dogs loose around the house where the movement workers stayed. Ms. Moody couldn't visit family during her civil rights activities without putting all their lives in danger.

This experiences cause her realize how sick Mississippi whites were and how "their disease, an incurable disease," could prompt them even to kill to preserve "the segregated Southern way of life" While Moody is working for CORE, she slowly becomes angry; angry that she is not seeing the change she had hoped for, in the time she had hoped for, and angry that so many black people refused to work as diligently as herself and her activist peers did. Moody experiences the most fear throughout the entire story during this time when she learns she has made the Klan list. In the chapters that follow she comments on the impact of the assassinations of Medgar Evers and President John F. Kennedy on the Civil Rights Movement, and the escalating turmoil across the South. Just before the final chapter, along with her fellow "Woolworth orphans," Moody graduates from Tougaloo College. The short final chapter ends with her joining a busload of civil rights workers on their way to Washington, D.C. As the bus moves through the Mississippi landscape, her fellow travelers sing the anthem of the Movement.

I understood a little better how very difficult it was to bring about change and the terrible toll it took after reading this very well-written book.

Favorite Quotes

“But something happened to me as I got more and more involved in the Movement. It no longer seemed important to prove anything. I had found something outside myself that gave meaning to my life.”

“Before Emmett Till’s murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me—the fear of being killed just because I was black. This was the worst of my fears. I knew once I got food, the fear of starving to death would leave. I also was told that if I were a good girl, I wouldn’t have to fear the Devil or hell. But I didn’t know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough, I thought.”

I read this after The Help because I knew it would certainly tie in with that book. I had to go to my books from a women's history course I took over 20 years ago. There are others dealing with black/white relations from that course that I may also read. As for this one, I was not impressed with her writing style, but I did learn from her experiences and those of the people around her. These experiences re-inforce and expand on the stories from The Help and,told as they were by a black woman, can be compared to those told by the white author of The Help. The genres are different, since Moody's is an autobiography as opposed to a work of fiction. The fiction is much more entertaining and, in some ways, more believable, but Moody cannot dress up the sheer horror of those days in 1950's and 60's Mississippi. Unfortunately, it feels as though chunks of her material might have been taken out just so only the extremes of the day were exhibited here.

A must read !!! I never heard about Anne Moody in school. Unsurprising but disappointing nonetheless. She was a remarkable woman in the civil rights movement.

I feel like this book has helped me to understand just how difficult it was to be a civil rights worker. I think that it's easy to glorify them because we know that the work they were doing was morally right, and I understood their bravery before this, but I'm not sure I ever saw just how hard their jobs were because of how unwanted their efforts were. I guess I thought that the people they served were just waiting for them to arrive.

Moody's account of her time working with CORE during the Freedom Summer in 1964 really emphasizes how futile it felt, trying to register Black people to vote in rural Mississippi. Even in Canton, a majority-Black town, the older Black people were apathetic toward voting, and those who did try to register were largely denied, thanks to the racist barriers to registration thrown ul by the registrar in the years before the Voting Rights Act. Their teenage children were enthusiastic about the cause, but after five teenagers who volunteered at Freedom House were shot at, the parents forbade their children from participating. The cops used all kinds of tactics to intimidate the Black community and the CORE workers alike.

Moody and her colleagues worked tirelessly for months to try to effect change, with no money and no resources, trying to motivate a community with no money and no resources, a healthy fear of the white ruling class, and the collectively-held understanding that the way to get along was to go along.

So the book doesn't really have a happy ending. I mean, yes, Moody put herself through college and got an education and was really motivated and hard-working, so in that sense it was a happy ending. But not really. She is on a bus to Washington, DC, to testify at COFO hearings. Everyone is singing We Shall Overcome. Moody doesn't join them. She hears the words to the song -- We shall overcome some day -- and she leaves us with "I wonder. I really wonder."

I just felt her exhaustion and frustration and anger at that moment.

I first heard this book recommended as an alternative to The Help: a memoir about the segregated South and the civil rights movement, written by a black woman who became an activist. After reading it, I consider it an excellent alternative to all those books about the segregated South written by white people – you know the ones, with their cardboard too-good-to-be-true characters who exist to be victims. You get much more texture and nuance, a far more credible picture of individuals and their communities, from someone who came from that world than from an outsider.

Anne Moody was born to a poor family in rural Mississippi, where she grew up caring for many younger siblings and started work cleaning houses at a young age. The early part of this book is less about segregation than growing up poor – tellingly, Moody remembers exactly how much she made at every job she had, and as a teenager she had some pretty awful ones. Apparently she’s called herself an activist rather than a writer, but don’t believe it. First, even when the subject matter is mundane, her writing keeps it interesting: simple but clear and very readable, and she takes creative license in writing scenes and dialogue (this may annoy some purists, but didn’t bother me). Second, the book never feels like an op-ed piece; Moody writes about events as she experienced them at the time, so, for instance, even though later she comes to despise all the white people in her hometown, this doesn’t stop her from writing positively about early employers in the first section of the book.

In college Moody became involved with the civil rights movement, which forms the focus of the later part of the book. She participates in some sit-ins, which get ugly, but her main activity is trying to sign black people up to vote, which in rural Mississippi at the time was a dangerous occupation: the workers regularly get threats from the white community, they’re harassed by police, and for several years Moody is unable to visit home for fear of harm to her family. It’s no surprise when by the end of the book she’s burned out and disillusioned; one of the things this book shows is the far-reaching effect of even a small amount of violence and intimidation. You don’t need the KKK beating everyone up, as they do in the more melodramatic novels set in this period, to explain the system of social control that existed. Moody and others showed extraordinary courage in standing up to that system, and if some elements of her story seem foreign to us now (all right, y’all, we’re driving across the South in an integrated car! I hope we make it), it’s because of the brave people who took risks to change society. Sometimes I think we forget that the civil rights movement wasn’t just marches and the “I Have a Dream” speech (ironically, Moody was not a fan of that speech. She didn’t think the movement needed dreamers).

At any rate, I consider this memoir well worth reading, especially for Americans interested in how much our country has changed (and how much it hasn’t) in the last 50 years. It grabbed my attention right away and proved to be an enthralling read, and I’m only sorry Moody hasn’t published more since this came out in 1968; I’m sure she has more to say.

Powerful memories of coming of age in the Deep South. I loved the intimacy, humanity, courage embedded in this book. A very rewarding read.