This was a touching story that gave me an inside look at the injustices African Americans faced (and still face) because of discrimination in the 50s and 60s. What Anne Moody lived through, her struggles to keep fighting when she knew all her efforts were not going to change things, was moving and very real. I could feel her pain as she described her experiences. I did think some of the descriptions of the rallies was a bit long-winded but otherwise, a great read.

A sad, sobering, down-to-earth look at the Civil Rights movement. The author does not claim to be a "writer," but an activist who wanted to tell her own story. With that in mind, this story was truly one that needed to be told. This book is required reading in some colleges. It provides us with an inside look at growing up in the south in the 50s and 60s - a painful aspect of American history that cannot be ignored. The author was a part of the famous sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Mississippi and was severely mistreated.

Criticisms: 1) An unreasonable amount of coarse language was a downside; the story would have been equally impacting without the swearing. 2) I was saddened by the author's incessant lack of hope. She lived a very tough life and seemed unable to ever pull herself up and out. Her story ends on a bitter tone and she discontinued her work in the Movement. I'm glad I read the book as it painted such a vivid picture of what "regular people" in the South have been through, but I can't help but wonder if the author still lives in sadness and bitterness today. I would like to know that she lives in spiritual freedom, but she has chosen to live in seclusion from the public eye.

This intensely personal and painful memoir was published in 1968. I wish I could have read it and thought "thank heavens those days are over." Sadly, for everyone, it could have been written today without many changes. We may no longer have separate water fountains, but anyone who thinks that whites and blacks receive equal treatment under the law just isn't paying attention.

Anne Moody grew up in segregation-era Mississippi, and writes of her contemporaries being shot in cold blood while going about their daily lives, and of being openly intimidated for the "crime" of being born with brown skin. In "Coming of Age," she speaks of her hardscrabble childhood, her navigation of school challenges (she was the first in her family to go to university) and her dangerous work in the Civil Rights movement.

Anne Moody is, more than anything else, angry. She is furious with the "Uncle Toms" (her words) that are in her churches, schools and community. She is livid with the whites who expect her to serve coffee and clean house while they have their white supremacy committee meetings in the next room. When yet another murder happens (and they happen all the time) she's heartbroken, but she's also enraged. And, often, exhausted.

I took off one star because there are a lot of sequences where she gives word-for-word narration of the fights with her family members, about things that didn't, in the big scheme of things, really fit the rest of the narrative. There are big, ugly things happening all around her, but the reasons she flies off the handle seem, sometimes, to be trivial at best.

As a demonstration of how eloquent Moody's anger could become, I leave you with a quote from the book describing her frustration with the slow pace of the Movement, and her fury with the lack of defined leadership:

During the 1963 March on Washington:

By the time we got to Lincoln Memorial, there were already thousands of people there. I sat on the grass and listened to the speakers, to discover we had "dreamers" instead of leaders leading us. Just about every one of them stood up there dreaming. Martin Luther King went on and on talking about his dream. I sat there thinking that in Canton [where Moody did the bulk of her activism] we never had time to sleep, much less dream.

We still hear that today. Fine dream, but how do we achieve it? Infuriatingly, we also still have with us people who hear the words "equal rights" and automatically redefine them in their own brains as "special rights," as if human decency were a finite commodity. Until we find a way to fix the issues in both those groups, Coming of Age in Mississippi will remain painfully relevant.

A friend returned from a trip to Mississippi and bought me this book during her visit there. I looked forward to reading it because it promised an interesting first-hand perspective, that of Anne Moody, an insider in the civil rights movement or, as Sen. Edward Kennedy stated, "A history of our time, seen from the bottom up." I was greatly disappointed because it offered little insight.

The autobiography often read like a catalogue of events: I did this and then I did this and then. . . From my studies and readings, I'm familiar with the facts of what happened; I expected to read about the impact of the events. It would have been interesting to read about how she felt, especially during events like the Woolworth's lunch counter sit-in. Only 3 1/2 pages are devoted to this protest, and the focus is on what everyone did, not on her feelings at the time. Being a participant, Moody could have added to the historical record by describing personal reactions, thereby increasing the reader's understanding and arousing his/her empathy. Her account is the equivalent of a newspaper story.

When there is an attempt to describe her feelings, it is not very revealing. She does faint a lot: "Everything around me went black" (387) and "my head began to spin" (402). Other reactions to situations are to move slowly or not at all: "It took me about an hour to change my uniform" (388) and "I sat there for a while with my face buried in my hands" (414).

There are many contradictions in the book. She makes statements like, "if [the white teachers] were at all like the whites I had previously known, I would leave the school immediately" (267). This statement totally ignores previous comments: "I thought of how nice these [white] people were to us . . . [They] treated me like I was their daughter. They were always giving me things and encouraging me . . . " (59). Summarizing her first experiences at working for whites, she says, "The five I had worked for so far had been good to me" (118).

Her treatment of her family is likewise contradictory. With her sister she moves into an apartment and then leaves her to cover the costs: "We had just moved into that apartment, we owed at least one hundred dollars on the furniture, and she couldn't take care of those bills alone" (399). She admits to "hat[ing] to run out on Adline" (399), but she does it nonetheless. Then, when Adline does not attend Anne's graduation, Anne says, "She had lied and said that she would come to the graduation" (419), although Adline had made no such promise when she spoke about attending the ceremony (400).

"Publisher's Weekly" praised Moody for telling her story "without a trace of see-what-a-martyr-am-I" but I found she could be full of self-pity. She talks about her exhaustion and having to wear the same clothes all day and losing "'about fifteen pounds in a week'" (324). She is upset that no family member attends her college graduation: "'Here I am,' I thought, 'alone, all alone as I have been for a long time'" (415 - 416). She repeatedly bemoans the fact that she can't go home, totally disregarding the fact that she was the one who chose to sever ties with her family: "'These people just ain't no damn good! Everybody in this fuckin' town ain't no good. I'm gonna leave this goddamn town right now'" (210). Incidentally, after this tirade, she complains that her stepfather is "'running around the house cursing all the time'" (214).

Moody can be admired for some candor in the book. Blacks are not viewed as totally innocent; for example, she decries the treatment her mother receives from her second husband's family "for no reason at all than the fact that she was a couple of shades darker than the other members of their family. Yet they were Negroes and we were also Negroes. I just didn't see Negroes hating each other so much" (59). Several times she mentions her frustration with the apathy of the people she is trying to register for the vote. She is present for Martin Luther King's speech in Washington, but she dismisses it: "I sat on the grass and listened to the speakers, to discover we had 'dreamers' instead of leaders leading us. Just about every one of them stood up there dreaming. Martin Luther King went on and on talking about his dream. I sat there thinking that in Canton we never had time to sleep, much less to dream" (335).

There is no doubt that Blacks suffered under the Jim Crow laws, but some of Moody's descriptions seem over-the-top. The arrest of protesters in Jackson and the presence of police dogs, though they "were not used" (298), prompt her to compare the situation to Nazi Germany. Policemen are compared to Nazi soldiers (305) and a fairgrounds detention centre is called a "concentration camp" (360).

The writing style is tedious to say the least. The repeated use of short, simple sentences becomes very monotonous: "I was there from the very beginning. Jackie Robinson was asked to serve as moderator. This was the first time I had seen him in person. . . . Jackie was a good moderator, I thought. He kept smiling and joking. People felt relaxed and proud" (285). Where did Publisher's Weekly find "good writing"?!

Moody has a story worthy of telling, but it could have been more effectively told. As is, it is a tedious read which details mundane events and omits the personal emotions that would have made the book a very compelling read.

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This book is basically three books and each one turns the previous one on its head in some significant ways. The book came out in 1968, but when you begin the opening section which takes place in the 1940s in Mississippi, and when you think about the title itself, it would be easy to think this book actually takes place 25, 50, 04 75 years previously, depending on the ways in which certain details allow for. This opening section is about the formation of Anne Moody's family through the marriage of her parents, the very at-odds relationship her parents had, the discipline meted out to the children, and finally, the very necessarily break up of the parents. This is where the illusion of ancientness breaks as Anne's mood is made so much lighter at her understanding that her parents needed to break up and how much lighter that made certain parts of her life.

From there, we move on the school -- first elementary and middle school, where we learn about the small forms of stratifications and rules governing gender and race play out. There's plenty of middle school weirdness at play in these parts. In high school and college, we get more about who Anne is as a person, what is developing in her and what she will hold valuable. The memoir hinges upon her learning about the death of Emmet Till, who was murdered about 20 miles or so where Anne Moody was growing up. And because he was from Chicago and she was from Mississippi and our collections feelings of the last 70 years has shaped it, it's shocking to learn about the mixed reactions among the Black people she knows. This begins to show us the levels of repression happening in Jim Crow Mississippi. Once she's in college, Anne moves on to a kind of near full-time activism, and finds herself at the center of almost everything, including having spent part of the day with Medgar Evers on the day he was murdered, and even saying afterward, that she needed to go get arrested because being in jail with other activists was the only place she could think.

It's an amazing record of a time and a place, and because it was written in 1968 it's seethes with raw and fresh feelings throughout.

Bra innsight til Civil Rights Movement, men føler det er bedre biografer vi kunne ha lest istedet/ i tillegg

Pensum

This was an autobiography that Anne Moody wrote in the late 60s. She starts with her earliest growing up days in a hard life, poor and black in Mississippi, and she shares her own awakening not as a commentary, but vividly and emotionally as it happens to her. Her observations are frank and I think that the fact that it was written then, rather than looking back from the relative safety and calm of decades later, makes it a very powerful and frank discussion of her own involvement in the civil rights movement.

It's not glorified by later successes and narratives commonly accepted around the country. She openly questions aspects of leaders' strategies, as well as what she had to give up in terms of home and place, and personal health, to devote herself to the struggle.

It is akin to the very sharp and accurate memories of an elder of the movement, rather than a sweeping history or even focused history that pieces together evidence from numerous sources. And it was a very engaging and worthwhile read, to boot. It is more possible for me to begin to fathom the personal sacrifices made by not only leaders but everyday organizers and protesters during this time, highlighting those smaller community leaders whose stories don't get told in classrooms or by historians today so much.

The links between oppression and poverty are also so stark and obvious in the daily accounts she writes, and so important to remember when over-politicized dialogues on race today can ignore those realities.

This book was published in 1968, the year MLK was assassinated and when it seemed that the federal civil rights laws established over the preceding few years might not actually take hold in reality. Though the federal government belatedly got behind the Black (then Negro) people demanding equality, the backlash continued to be vicious, violent, and unpunished. This memoir gives chilling details of how that played out in real life in Mississippi.

Anne Moody tells her tale in blunt language that retains some of the ungrammatical mannerisms of her culture. For example, she often adds the word "them" when describing a group of people but doesn't add the word "and." So she might write, "Mom them went to church" when she means that her mother and the rest of them in the family went to church. It's a credit to the editors that they didn't knock this out. Similarly, they deserve a ton of credit, given that it was a book by a Black woman in 1968, to leave in many obscenities and many blunt references to sex. I imagine there was nothing else on the market like it at the time.

The story is both familiar and unimaginable at the same time. It's familiar because we all know -- despite the efforts of Republican governors across the country -- that this country has been racist since its inception and that segregationist laws passed in the wake of the Civil War kept almost all Black people in the South in virtual bondage into the 1950s. Whatever rights they had were negated by relentless trickery, violence, and simple exclusion from the common avenues of American culture and economics. Probably nowhere was worse than Mississippi, where Anne Moody was born. (Actually she was born Essie Mae Moody, and Anne became her name due to a mixup on a replacement birth certificate. Her mother didn't have the money to try to get it fixed, and Anne she became publicly after that, though not to her family.)

Anne/Essie Mae begin with the deep poverty she experienced as a young child. Nothing to eat, living in a one- or two-room shack without electricity or plumbing, no shoes, and so on. We've heard it before, but here's a real person talking about what it was like to get by on a few beans and a piece of bread day after day. Her father actually earned decent money for a Black person at the time, but he frittered it away gambling and drinking, most likely as the way to drown his sorrows over the life he and his race were forced to live. Essie Mae's mother kept the family together as best as she could, working as a domestic or in a restaurant until days before having the next in what became 8 children. Her husband left her, and she eventually found a new man, who eventually married her after toggling between her and another woman --- a woman with much lighter skin, Essie Mae informs us. Things got nominally better in the sense that after a dozen terrible rentals, this new husband built them a small home with plumbing. But his family scorned Essie Mae's mom (known by the beautiful nickname Toosweet) because she was darked than they were.

Seeing her mother's sorrow and humiliation was the first step towards Essie Mae's ultimate move towards civil rights. It was ironic that she first saw the inequality within the Black community, which of course was instilled by Whites. By the time she was halfway through high school, she was known locally for speaking her mind and standing up for what was right. This cost her jobs, at times, with White families for whom she cleaned, babysat, and cooked, adding her money to the family pot.

She left her home late in high school, in part because she implied that her stepfather was eyeing her a little too closely. And this is one of the startling things about the book. Not that her stepfather lusted after her, but that everyone seemed to go after her and other girls, and that this was just sort of accepted. The school principal and the basketball coach each complimented her (and other girls) on their legs and bodies, they sometimes touched them, and so on. Boys their age speculated about what it would be like to have sex with various girls. And these don't even count the threats from Whites, who were still raping Black girls with impunity as if it was antebellum times. Moody indicates that her righteous anger kept her safe, and I guess it's probably true. It's astonishing what was said and, perhaps, done to these girls. And how it affected their outlook on life is terribly sad to contemplate.

Anyway, Moody spent her summers in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, working adult jobs (chicken factory, restaurant) to earn money, which she was saving for college. And she did go to college, where she quickly fell in with activist students. She details incidents she participated in, such as sit-ins in which she and others were roughed up, nearly hanged, and then jailed. She was jailed a bunch of times, getting more committed to the movement each time that terror was unleashed. As with the sexual harassment, it's hard to imagine the nerve it took for a kid of 18 or 19 with almost not a dime to her name to stand up to an entire power structure. But she did over and over again. Those sections of the book are harrowing.

What comes next is equally sad. She tells about the emotional and psychological toll it took on her and others. The fear every night that she would be murdered, that her home would be burned, was with her for months at a time. She says she never slept a full night and was in a daze most of the time due to exhaustion and hunger. She got angry at Black people who didn't support the cause, especially those with some authority (ministers, principals) who benefited from a little White support. She calls them Uncle Toms over and over, a term used to show her scorn for all of them. And when the worst horrors occurred -- murder of Medgar Evans, Birmingham school bombing, local beatings she witnessed -- she went into a shell. But she'd punch through the shell and try again, even as her mother wrote to say that her activities were threatening the entire family's safety.

The book concludes with her on the brink of deciding that nonviolence was not the answer, and that stronger means were essential. She was tired of being beaten and harassed, and to have the authorities do nothing (and, in fact, often be perpetrators). Although she doesn't say it, I'm guessing she was drifting towards the Malcolm X camp and away from the MLK camp -- and who could blame her? The other choices were worse: give up entirely, or leave the South and try to forget the whole thing. Ultimately, as I read online, she did leave the movement and focused on her own education and used that to tell the story that's so powerful. So she contributed, but on her own terms, just as she had lived her life even under Jim Crow Mississippi.

Do I think this book still resonates? Yes. In fact, as kids get further from the actual doings of the civil rights era, and as right-wingers pretend that Whites are the ones suffering, this book is a great reminder of how it really was. (I'm sure this book is banned across Republican school districts, if they've heard of it at all.) The terror she faced and the sheer drudgery of her work as a kid and then her canvassing for voting rights and other rights are beyond what almost anyone could endure. Anne Moody is a hero, and kids should read this book to learn about her as they would better-known men.

i didn't know if i would be able to fully appreciate this autobiography. in college, i read so many memoirs and biographies that they began to lose their spirit for me. so i was a bit resistant to read this one. but i am so glad that i did. there's a way that anne moody draws you into her life ... it's so gripping, realistic, and compelling - that i felt the emotions that she wrote. by the end of the novel, i felt as exhausted as she wrote about - as if i had participated in all of movements. amazingly poignant and vulnerable - i would recommend this to anyone.

There are many levels and layers to this book. Firstly, it is a story of a young African American girl and her early childhood and the poverty and struggles of her family in Mississippi. It is also a story of a fiery intelligent young women dealing with the racism, poverty and hatred that she encountered growing up in such a G-d forsaken place, the author's own struggles with her family ,and her search for autonomy. Most importantly it covers a portion of the history of the civil rights movement , freedom summer, and the heroes who participated in it, sacrificing their lives and sense of security for justice. It is well written, and honest, the author is unabashed in her opinions . She does not mince words , sentiments or emotions. When I compare this story to The American Ghost, a recent novel, American Ghost pails in its insipid, view of the south and the consequences of it's terrible hate filled racist history and it's made up love story and fabrications. American Ghost never deals on a real level with the problems engendered by a a racist society.
An incredible memoir, this book should be mandatory reading for all those interested in studying this sad, brutal period of American History.

The fact that this book contains things that Still go on today is sad. This book is incredible, raw, truthful. Miss Moody is an incredible author.

An incredibly powerful and poignant account of living in Mississippi during the 1960s. I have so much respect for civil rights activists like Moody, who tirelessly fought for Black rights even under the threat of incarceration and death. Her work with organizations such as NAACP, SNCC, and CORE led her to become alienated from most of her family, which was really heartbreaking, but it also allowed her to connect with many others who were just as angry as her and who were unafraid to challenge the existing circumstances and unjust violence against Black people.