A beautiful and touching story about black people's lives back in the 20th century. Would recommend for civil right activists and young people in general. Easy and short read

3.75 stars, it left me wanting to know more about what happens to Anne after graduation from Tougaloo and during the summer of 1964 in Canton, Mississippi.

Do yourself a favor: read this book. And once you're done, read it again. Anne Moody reminds us that the work of liberation is riddled with violence and death which exacts an enormous emotional toll that is not easily overcome. The south in general and MS more specifically was a vile and rotten place predicated on terrorism and violence. And yet, folks looked the beast in the eyes and said, "enough is enough." Read this book to remind you how far we've come, but also read it as a challenge to reconsider whatever perceptions you have of our modern world such that we may all continue the work of justice for all.

n  The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that the federal government was directly or indirectly responsible for most of the segregation, discrimination, and poverty in the South.n

I've noticed a tendency towards One Memoir to Rule Them All when it comes to times of turmoil, whether 1960's US civil rights or the Shoah or Guantanamo Bay. Thus, it is likely an uncomfortable shock for some to realize that there aren't only multiple survivors of German concentration camps living in their country, but that they mostly live in poverty, and aren't nearly as safely tucked away in death or international recognition as readers of "Schindler's List" would like to think. Brutal as recently reviewed Twelve Years a Slave is, its story happened long ago, and it isn't nearly as uncomfortably familiar as the 1940s-1960s events of Mississippian Anne Moody, what with its former slave catcher and now military industrial complex cops and questions of blackness, gender, blackness and gender, nonviolent protest, active resistance, gun use, gun control, federal vs state, federal hand in hand with state, the KKK (still legal, by the way), government conspiracies, education, child labor, and other singularly US twists on the concept of your money or your life. This isn't a happy read by far, but it is a true one, and it gives the reader no sense of "progress" being anything more than the long, hard, depression inducing, terrorized slog that it is. If, upon reading this, you can stand to call the US police force anything other than the most powerful terrorist organization ever known. you are a liar and a fool.

If you made a plot diagram of 'Coming of Age in Mississippi', you wouldn't get anything near to what is expected of a bildungsroman. You can make CoAiM fit if you strip enough of the context away and leave the bare bones of schools attended, grades received, and year of college degree accomplished, but you would miss the entire point of a four year old black girl escaping a burning house and charging into a life of endless child labor fenced in by scams, segregation, and terrorism, the reality of which hits Anne Moody right the around the age the average white kid is getting bored of Chuck E. Cheese and starting to fool around a little too much around the tenets of abstinence. Moody's life is the incontestable record of the origins of gun control (always becomes an issue when black people get louder about rights to self defense), the War on Drugs (when the fear wore off in the '60's, narcotics had to step in), and Black Lives Matter, all of which makes sense if one doesn't cling to one's bad faith and see the US as anything but the antiblack settler state that has merely evolved with the times rather than progressed. If one gets frustrated with Moody's lack of denoument and repeated mental breakdowns, you're not getting it, but that won't stop you from unconsciously benefiting from her trials and tribulations.

Moody's memoir is definitely one of the more cynical ones out there regarding civil rights and black people existing as human beings, and considering how, just the other day, I had to listen to some nonblack individual saying black people weren't actually empowered by 'Black Panther', I don't think Moody would be impressed with the current situation. Still, this instance of nonblack people explaining how black people actually feel is a perfect example of why Moody's writing is important, coming as it does from a young black woman in an age when probably the most easily acquirable text coming from that demographic was a slave narrative, if that. It's amazing how much has changed (the beginning of 'Selma' is recorded in this text), and unforgivable how much has remained the same. So long as the whites of the US permit high school age survivors of mass shootings to be terrorized by the alt-right, all that change for the better will go to waste.

n  "As long as I live, I'll never be beaten by a white man again. Not like in Woolworth's. Not any more. That's out. You know something else, God? Nonviolence is out. I have a good idea Martin Luther King is talking to you, too. If he is, tell him that nonviolence has serve its purpose. Tell him that for me, God, and for a lot of other Negroes who must be thinking it today. If you don't believe that, then I know you must be white, too. And if I ever find out you are white, then I'm throughout with you. And if I find out you are black. I'll try my best to kill you when I get to heaven.n

A must read for those interested in American history, especially conditions in the American South, before and during the Civil Rights movement. Actually, this should be read in every American classroom.

Completely forthright and never sentimental, Anne Moody's autobiography is an eye opening experience. Moody, who was the same age as Emmett Till, was deeply affected by his kidnapping and murder and a fiery determination to fight for justice and equality was born. This book is a must read. Highly recommended.

An important civil rights advocate and participant, Moody shows us all there is to see in Mississippi. She's honest about herself and what she really thought. Her revelations about race and society vying for her submission to itself create a noticeable turn in her young brain. You lose that innocence with her, and experience her pains, every single one. Her words make you sympathize with her plight.

All this was not so long ago. We aren't distanced enough by time yet to think of this era as old. It's still living and breathing and some key figures are still alive. Humbling and insightful.

I finished this book over a month ago. I wanted to think about it a bit before I wrote a review, but I am still mulling it over. So here is my review, mostly consisting of quotes that I want to remember, but I know I'll re-read this book several times in the years to come.

One thing I really appreciated about this autobiography was Anne Moody's perspective on events I consider seminal to the civil rights movement in Mississippi. On Emmett Till's kidnapping and murder:

"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."

Black Lives Matter, anyone?

On the integration of the Woolworth's in Jackson:

"After the sit-in, all I could think of was how sick Mississippi whites were. They believed so much in the segregated Southern way of life, they would kill to preserve it. I sat there in the NAACP office and thought of how many times they had killed when this way of life was threatened. 'Maybe more will die before it is over with,' I thought. Before the sit-in, I had always hated the whites in Mississippi. Now I knew it was impossible for me to hate sickness. The whites had a disease, an incurable disease in its final stage. What were our chances against such a disease?"

On the push to protest so much that the Mississippi jails would overflow:

"The fairgrounds were everything I had heard they were. The compounds they put us in were two large buildings used to auction off cattle during the annual state fair. They were about a block long, with large openings about twenty feet wide on both ends where the cattle were driven in. The openings had been closed up with wire. It reminded me of a concentration camp. It was hot and sticky and the girls were walking around half dressed all the time. We were guarded by four policemen. They had rifles and kept an eye on us through the wired sides of the building. As I looked through the wire at them, I imagined myself in Nazi Germany, the policemen Nazi soldiers. They couldn't have been any rougher than these cops. Yet this was America, 'the land of the free and the home of the brave.'"

I had chills most of the time I was reading this, which in Mississippi's July and August heat was an unusual experience. I got them again typing these quotes. All I can say about this book is that it is one of the most powerful autobiographies I've ever read and that it should be required reading for everyone. Everyone.

Powerful narrative of the toll Civil Rights voter registration and anti-poverty work in the sixties took on local workers--body, mind, and spirit. The book's focus on the struggle for daily bread--growing up poor in Mississippi and earning one's way through college and beyond--was helpful in marking both large-scale, systematic injustice and the determination and sacrifice of local workers in the major organizations. An absolute page turner, with powerful passages on attempts--successful and unsuccessful--to integrate--not only lunch counters, but churches, too.

As a native daughter of Mississippi, and after finishing my own memoir, I sat down to read Anne Moody's, Coming of Age in Mississippi. I found it to be authentic, unvarnished and described life as it was for blacks and whites during the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s in rural Mississippi. As I became immersed in the book, I realized that Anne Moody had grown up and came of age in the county adjacent to the one in which I grew up and also came of age. She and I even attended the same college, Tougaloo College. I learned that she was one of the students who participated in the Civil Rights march in Jackson, Mississippi that caused an incident at the Woolworth store. Their treatment gain national attention.

Moody's description of life in Mississippi during that time brings history to life.

Pretty good up until she joined CORE.. got a lil bored at the end.

A powerful and no-frills memoir about growing up in the pre-Civil Rights era Mississippi, and ultimately the author's involvement with the Movement. You may not know the name Anne Moody, but if you have studied Civil Rights, you are likely familiar with her image. She is one of the young people at the Woolworths sit-in in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963; an iconic image came out of this sit-in, as white people poured ketchup, mustard, hot coffee, and anything else available over the demonstrators.

Moody's book isn't just about her time as a civil rights activist. The bulk of the text is devoted to her time as a child and in school. It's really only when she gets to college that she begins to be involved in activism, though that isn't taken up until the back half of the book. We get a real feel for how it was to live as a black person in that place and time, especially the arbitrariness of the violence and other scornful treatment that could be visited upon you at any time. These chapters show how, even in the midst of horrendous mistreatment, people still try to live their lives as best as possible, and the importance Moody attached to things like her grades or basketball or what to wear to an event are reminders that the yoke of oppression cannot take away all our humanity.

Though there isn't really one galvanizing event that turns Moody into an activist, she becomes more and more aware of the social and institutional features of her existence that draw the ideological lines that serve to uphold the order. She sees her friends and family brutalized and scared, including the burning of a house in her town that results in the deaths of several black people that is never even investigated by local authorities. By the time she is college-aged, she spends almost all her free time working with groups like SNCC, the NAACP, and CORE.

The book was published in 1968, and thus comes from a moment in history when the ultimate result of the civil rights movement was not entirely known. Moody is no great optimist about the pace of change in our country and in that respect she her certainly been proven correct. To state the obvious: because of the work of Anne Moody and many others like her in the civil rights movement, our country has become significantly improved and more egalitarian. But to state the other obvious: the work is far from over, and does not always move forward in a steady manner or at a satisfactory pace. She saw and recognized the very long road that remained in front her.

This memoir is a valuable artifact of its time and offers great insight into the stakes for joining in the movement to correct the worst aspects of racial oppression in the American South. A harrowing and urgent read, even many decades later.