This is a really good autobiography if you're looking to read more about movers and shakers of the Civil Rights Movement. Moody was part of the Woolworth's sit-in, and a lot of what she experienced both prior and during her involvement to the movement is what Black people today are still dealing with. The autobiography is written as a straight-forward account, starting from her childhood and ending during her mid-twenties. I listened to this on audiobook, and because it wasn't read by Moody the audiobook experience lacks a bit of emotional nuance. Overall though, I would definitely recommend it.

An exploration of growing up as a young Black girl in Mississippi, Anne Moody recounts her life with raw facts. The details of Moody’s life are revelatory regarding the harsh disparity between blacks and whites in economics, education, and the justice system.

Moody was born in 1940; Emmet Till in 1941. Moody talks about the shock waves of anger and fear that reverberated through Black communities when Till’s murder occurs in 1955. At the time, she is working for a white woman who tells her, “He was killed because he got out of place with a white woman. A boy from Mississippi would have known better. This boy was from Chicago.” Moody says this brought into her life a new fear of “being killed just because I was black.” Moody is fifteen years old and for the first time, she not only deals with this new fear, but also begins to experience hate. She writes, “I hated all the other whites who were responsible for the countless murders Mrs. Rice had told me about..”

Mississippi was one of the most repressive states for blacks in the Jim Crow south. 539 lynchings are recorded between the end of Reconstruction and the 1960s. Mississippi didn’t have as many Jim Crow laws as other states because they weren’t needed. Force of custom maintained things as whites dictated according to ‘American Radio Works’ report, A State of Siege, Mississippi: A Place Apart.

Anne Moody’s account is invaluable as it shows what was happening during important moments of the Civil Rights Movement. She was a participant in the sit-in at Woolworth’s in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963. The cruelty and inhumanity of whites as they resisted this attempt of black students and faculty from Tougaloo College making a statement that they deserved service in the whites section of the diner is mind-blowing. Mustard, ketchup, scalding coffee were poured on the protestors. Beatings, curses, horrible denigrations, and intermittent assaults occurred, all while police looked on. It’s hard to imagine the kind of courage it would have taken to withstand this kind of abuse for hours. This incident and other civil action demonstrations began to let people across the US and around the world know the truth about how blacks were being treated in Mississippi and across much of the south.

The tide was being turned and young black people like Anne Moody were at the forefront, sometimes at great cost. Moody was on the verge of collapse from the mental, emotional, and physical strain at different junctures in her fight for equal rights.

For the most part, Anne Moody seems self-aware, intelligent, and driven for the Movement. Her mother warns her to stay away from her home community where her name is on the Klan blacklist. She lived and worked intermittently in New Orleans and met family members there, but fear kept her from returning to her home community for many years. Much of her Civil Rights work takes place in Canton, Mississippi.

I would have liked to know more about Moody’s feelings/emotions as they occurred. I did learn some of them as she neared collapse, but it felt very surface, not as deep and reflective as I would have wished. I lost some interest toward the end of the book, and I think the constant reporting of protests and meetings added to this. Moody was a plucky and determined warrior and deserves to be remembered for her contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. Having her first hand account made this a worthwhile read.

This was a such hard and honest read. So much I never learned about in school as well.

Posted at Shelf Inflicted

I recently read Kathryn Stockett’s The Help and while I enjoyed this story tremendously, I wanted to read something that was less uplifting, more realistic, and told from the perspective of an African-American. Anne Moody’s powerful memoir was the perfect choice.

This is a well-told and fascinating story about the author's life growing up in rural Mississippi, and her fight against racism. Her story is chronologically told, from the author's youth in rural Mississippi, her education, family relationships, poverty, racism, violence and finally, her involvement with the Civil Rights Movement.

The last section of the book devoted to Moody’s activism was riveting and deeply disturbing. She participated in the heavily publicized Woolworth sit-in, which was known for its violence, and was deeply shaken by the deaths of four black girls in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.


1963 Woolworth Sit-in, Jackson, Mississippi

Once a religious child, she questioned her faith in God.

n  

“Now talk to me, God. Come on down and talk to me. You know, I used to go to Sunday school, church, and B.T.U. every Sunday. We were taught how merciful and forgiving you are. Mama used to tell us that you would forgive us twenty-seven times a day and I believed in you. I bet you those girls in Sunday school were being taught the same as I was when I was their age. Is that teaching wrong? Are you going to forgive their killers? You not gonna answer me, God, hmm? Well if you don’t want to talk, then listen to me. As long as I live, I’ll never be beaten by a white man again. Not like in Woolworth’s. Not anymore. 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 served 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 through with you. And if I find out you are black, I’ll try my best to kill you when I get to heaven.”

n

Moody provided details about intimidation, beatings, shootings, and other acts of violence enacted by the Ku Klux Klan against African Americans and their white supporters and about the institutionalized racism that kept many black families mired in poverty. I just wish that Moody had spent more time with the story of her activism and the efforts and sacrifices of Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, and others, rather than mundane details about childhood.

I am thankful to Anne Moody and all the other young people who sacrificed their jobs, safety, and lives to make a stand against injustice and change the course of our history and for their stories that keep them alive in our minds and hearts.

This was written by a woman who had first-hand experience with the evils of racism and bigotry. She started life in a shack and even though she got an education, it was difficult to remove herself from the face of southern self-righteous anger aimed at blacks and at nobody else except maybe a stray dog. I was raised in the south and I remember the Jim Crow laws and even as a child, I was ashamed about the segregation--separate water fountains, bathrooms, schools, movie theaters, etc. This writer sat at the whites-only lunch counters and the racists poured sugar in her hair! among other things. This was a terrible time in our country and, sadly, it still exists.

IQ "It was then that I realized I really didn't know what was going on all around me. It wasn't that I was dumb. It was just that ever since I was nine, I'd had to work after school and do my lessons on lunch hour. I never had time to learn anything, to hang around with people my own age. And you never were told anything by adults." (128)

This quote illustrates of moment of realization that is so key for Moody and the reader. I'm glad she didn't assume she was dumb or blame herself for not knowing, both then and now, it's in the white supremacist (and capitalist) interest to keep us so busy working we don't have time to think or question or organize. The system is working the way it should, it is designed this way. This was just one of many AHA moments Moody has that makes reading this book so pleasurable. Another is when she shares the story of her stepmother, Emma, being shot, she survives and responds “Him and Janie wouldn’t be fightin’ if Wilbert could get a good job and make enough to take care of them children. If these damn white folks ain’t shootin’ niggers’ brains out they are starving them to death. A nigger can’t make it no way he try in this fuckin’ place. Don’t y’all go blaming Wilbert for this” (226), Black people have always understood what’s what. Moody’s memoir describes a range of inequities as she talks about the deplorable segregated education she and her classmates received, the claustrophobic and inescapable nature of rural poverty made worse by the unbearable burden of sharecropping. Moody’s writing is simple and forthright, it also doesn’t shy away from using rural Southern Black vernacular. It’s a heavy read and there are many themes in this book, but one that stood out to me the most was terror. Maybe it's because I haven't read many memoirs about civil rights work (THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X, THE CHILDREN and WARRIORS DON'T CRY are the only ones that come to mind) so in this book the racial terror felt more suffocating, it's not like in a history book or an article where you can quickly move on to something else. The constant sense of terror and fear felt throughout the book (fear more so on the part of myself the reader because Moody is mostly fearless) makes Moody’s admission of being burned out even more remarkable. She doesn’t use those words but she often describes being on the verge of a mental breakdown and discusses how living Mississippi or just going for long walks would occasionally help her keep panic at bay. She also describes what seems like panic attacks but I don’t want to misdiagnose. I don’t know if she always coped in the healthiest ways but at least she doesn’t pretend the work was easy to leave behind, she also talks about how scared her co-workers were as well, two of the women she lived with took to sleeping with guns right next to them.

I loved Moody’s candor, not only when it comes to her mental health and the tolls of activism but also her thoughts on the leaders of the civil rights movement. She's fed up with nonviolence and dreams, recounting her time at the March on Washington thusly "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). This struck me as particularly admirable given that this book came out while Rev. King was still seen as a beloved leader of the non-violent arm of the civil rights movement. I would have loved to know what (if he even read it) thoughts he might have had on this book by a young Black woman (although he may have been assassinated right when it came out depending on the timing) especially since those weren’t the voices being uplifted in the movement or the media. Moody miraculously maintains a sense of humor while writing about (and living through) racist attacks and she also illustrates hilarious encounters with family, friends and her neighbors in all their small town quirky glory. She's also often funny on accident, as when she snaps at a friend trying to comfort her shortly after the bombing that killed four young girls in Birmingham, that "Black people have religion, white people have everything else". This dark humor persists throughout the book, it’s both funny and heartbreaking. My only critique of the book would be that I wanted to know more about what she thought about life in the North, she doesn’t comment on much about her trip to DC beyond the above quote on the futility of dreaming for racial progress. For someone so desperate to leave Mississippi I found it interesting that she didn’t want to write about what her first experience in the North was like. I also desperately wish we’d gotten a sequel, obviously that is impossible now but I think the book should have ended after her Washington testimony. The reader is left hanging, I suppose she could have planned another book and made the ending a cliff hanger on purpose and then changed her mind on writing it. But those are minor quibbles and would not keep me from recommending this book.

COMING OF AGE IN MISSISSIPPI is a masterful memoir vulnerable. Just as the title says it is a bildungsroman, racism is present throughout the entire book but there are small moments of joy as well as Moody enters young adulthood. Reading her revelations about herself and America is gratifying. This story manages to touch on so many topics because Moody witnesses so much: Black fear that turned into complacency and passivity which made her organizing work much harder, domestic servitude which was the only employment opportunity for Black women in the South, Freedom Summers, lynchings, miscegenation, the mental strain of living in a constant state of terror, police brutality, sit-ins, voter suppression. It’s all here. I marvel at anyone able to read this book and not be in a state of rage, especially because many of these systemic inequities from education to rural poverty still exist today. I was fully immersed in each chapter and have no doubt this book will be hard to shake, it's not a story I want to forget anyway. This book is unfortunately not at risk of being outdated any time soon and it’s a primary historical source more people need to read, it should be required middle and high school reading.

i loved the first half of the book. It painted a clear picture of a life of black family and black community in rural Mississippi in 1950s. Moody lived an eventful life, from early age she endured hard work, poverty, racism, family drama.. But the 2-nd part of the book was very monotonous and Moody's bright character got lost among all the students and activists.

The reviews were correct in saying that this memoir was unapologetically written.
Anne Moody’s unabashed representation of her past was raw and free, and difficult to read.
Her memory was impressive, with detailed descriptions of her life, like the way she acclimated to the brutal sun during summers of cotton-picking or her description of her fame as the senior queen. Yet, sometimes she brushes through significant moments of her life, like when she loses her faith, and how it changed her relationship to nature.
There was so much to gather from her life. She was always passionate and strong-willed. Her relationship with her mother was a source of pain, because her mother was stuck in the old ways of treatment, and was stricken with fear over what would happen if Anne continued to fight for the future of black people in the south. Yet, her mother seemed to always have that unconditional love and desire for connection with Essie, no matter what Essie did.
Essie May/Anne, constantly gave up everything in her life to fight for what she knew was unequivocally her purpose, to fight for a better life for Black people in the south. I could feel her trembling fear through the pages she wrote, depicting the horrendous treatment of black people in Mississippi. The amount of people who will never get justice left me feeling deep remorse, and I’m so glad there were people like her to fight, and to document the truth of what really happened.

Coming of Age in Mississippi was first published in 1968. The author, born in 1940, is six years older than I am so her life is relatively contemporaneous with mine, a factor that intrigues me although our lives are not at all the same other than that calendar years overlap. In 1968: the war in Vietnam is fully underway and politically divisive in the U.S.; Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis; Robert Kennedy is assassinated in San Francisco; Black power salute of raised fist at Olympics medal ceremony; Richard Nixon wins the presidential election, George Wallace gets 13.5%; Apollo 8 circles the moon.

The book covers two decades of the life of Anne Moody from the time she was four years old until she graduated from Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. She was the oldest of nine children and was working by the time she was nine to earn money to help support her family. At first she mostly worked as a mother’s helper with household chores and children. They called them maids back then and it was almost always black women/girls working for white women. The minimum wage was $1.25/hour in 1965. But they mostly didn’t get minimum wage. Lucky to get a dollar a day.

The first part of the book is titled Childhood and is about 30% of the book. It is about Anne until she finished eighth grade. This section is really about living a life of poverty more than about being a Negro, as they called themselves then. Plenty of meals were beans and bread, clothing for school was often used, Essie often could bring home leftover food from the homes she worked in. And she had to work to help the family. There was a new baby just about every year. In spite of a life with material need the family was strong and Essie was a good student. Some of the women who employed her helped expand her universe and helped her with her school work. Her parents had very limited education and were not much help for Essie with school. She was the 8th grade homecoming queen foreshadowing that she would achieve great things in her life! Now she was ready for high school.

The second section is about 25% of the book and is titled High School. Emmett Till, a fourteen year old black boy, was murdered in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman about the time school started. Annie was fourteen. She heard about this from another student while walking home from school. Because Annie had been working as well as being a fulltime student, she had not kept up with current events. Discussion of racial issues in school was nonexistent. There was no newspaper at home. But this killing emphasized to her that she could be in danger simply for being a Negro.

Working in a white home, she heard a group of women talking about the NAACP. Although she made an effort to find out what the letters meant and what the organization stood for, her mother was hesitant to give her much information since she was used to keeping in her “place” as a Negro. Annie was able to find a woman teacher who spent time with her outside of school telling her about Negro issues. Teachers could not talk about this in school; they would be fired if they did. The teacher who helped her was fired at the end of the year although Annie never knew why and never saw her again.

The third section is titled College and is about 10% of the book. She attended Natchez Junior College for two years on a basketball scholarship. She then transferred to and graduated from Tougaloo College. During college she joined the NAACP.

I thought of Reverend Dupree and his family who had been run out of Woodville when I was a senior in high school, and all he had done was to get up and mention NAACP in a sermon. The more I remembered the killings, beatings, and intimidations, the more I worried about what might happen to me or my family if I joined the NAACP. But I knew I was going to join, anyway. I had wanted to for a long time.

As a result of her activities in NAACP, Anne cut off most contact with her mother and family in Centreville so there would be no retaliation against them. She also was involved with SNCC (Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee) while she was in school.

The final third of the book is titled The Movement and is about Anne’s work in the civil rights movement. After college Anne began working for CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) full time in Canton, Mississippi, mostly on black voter registration. The monthly pay was $25, when she was paid which was not all the time. During this period black activist Medgar Evers was shot and killed in front of his home, four young black girls at church were killed by a bomb and President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Anne also went to the March on Washington for Peace and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave the I Have a Dream speech. Her dedication to be out front in the movement was costly to her health due to lack of resources for nutritious food and incredible stress. The book concludes with Anne boarding a Greyhound bus for Washington to tell about the conditions in Mississippi. She sits on the bus:

I sat there listening to “We Shall Overcome,” looking out the window at the passing Mississippi landscape. Images of all that had happened kept crossing my mind: the Taplin burning, the Birmingham church bombing, Medgar Evers’ murder, the blood gushing out of McKinley’s head, and all the other murders. I saw the face of Mrs. Chinn as she said, “We ain’t big enough to do it by ourselves,” C.O.’s face when he gave me that pitiful wave from the chain gang. I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes.

Anne Moody is not a polished professional writer. This book helped me once again to remember and honor the sacrifice that so many have made to bring what we have of freedom and justice to this country, and particularly to the South.

From the back cover of the market paperback:

Written without a trace of sentimentality or apology, this is an unforgettable personal story – the truth as a remarkable young woman named Anne Moody lived it. To read her book is to know what it is to have grown up black in Mississippi in the forties and fifties – to have survived with pride and courage intact.
In the now classic autobiography, she details the sights, smells, and suffering of growing up in a racist society and candidly reveals the soul of the black girl who had the courage to challenge it. The result is a touchstone work: an accurate, authoritative portrait of black family life in the rural South and a moving account of a woman’s indomitable heart.

Somehow I learned and internalized that SparkNotes and similar books are not OK to refer to and use. I guess that was because I was taught and experienced that people used them to cheat in school or to avoid doing the actual reading of a book. They were the same as the interlinear Latin/English textbook that was passed around by the kids in the back row of my high school Latin class. More recently as I have dealt with some reading and memory disabilities I have found that SparkNotes and audio books and movies based on books can all help me to have a better experience with books. I no longer have any formal academic need to read so all of my reading these days is done for pleasure or personal betterment.

Even though SparkNotes and the like still have a negative emotional connotation or gut feeling for me, I am trying to get by those feelings to approach them as an occasional resource when they are available. I have found some of these resources are available online for free. I am trying to feel comfortable using various tactics to remove or lower barriers to reading comprehension.
SparkNotes for this book are available online at http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/comingo...

Another common helping resource for me is to read GR reviews for a book as I read the book. As I have drifted into reading more mysteries, I try to avoid spoilers. However, I have found that knowing an outcome simply changes the reading experience for me rather than ruining it. I lived through the national events of this book so there were no spoilers!

I had Coming of Age in Mississippi on my bookshelf and was encouraged to read it at this time by reading the very popular book The Help. A GR review put that idea in my mind:

I recently read Kathryn Stockett’s The Help and while I enjoyed this story tremendously, I wanted to read something that was less uplifting, more realistic, and told from the perspective of an African-American. Anne Moody’s powerful memoir was the perfect choice.
This is a well-told and fascinating story about the author's life growing up in rural Mississippi, and her fight against racism. Her story is chronologically told, from the author's youth in rural Mississippi, her education, family relationships, poverty, racism, violence and finally, her involvement with the Civil Rights Movement.
Source: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

This book gets an extra star from me because it covers a time and events that were important to my growing up. I admired and was amazed by the willingness of people in the civil rights movement as well as regular black people to risk their lives and livelihoods in the struggle for justice. As a high school junior, I watched the 200,000 person March on Washington on TV and was moved to make my own contributions to social change in the 1960s and 1970s.

Four stars to experience the life of one young black girl becoming a woman in a tumultuous time and place.

This book had all of the charm and the trappings of an autobiography. It gave an excellent, personal portrait of life in rural Mississippi in the 50's and 60's, making historical events like the rise of the KKK more meaningful than in any textbook, but it jumped around cronologically, gave poor explanations of events, and sometimes left out whole stretches of history. The most important aspect of this book is the illustration of the multiple layers of inequality; sexism, racism, colorism with races, lust, love, family structure and ageism. Anne Moody lived a life that most of us could not imagine today, despite the multiple layers of injustice that remain.

“The revolution will put you in the driver's seat” (Gil Scott-Heron).

As a child in the United States, I was confronted every single February with what I thought was considered to be the civil rights movement. Through various novels I learned about slavery and the conditions on plantations around the world. I was taught that African-American's were given the right to vote in the United States in 1870 with the Fifteenth amendment but faced endless struggles actually making it to the ballots for the next 80+ years. I was taught that on August 28, 1963 a huge rally took place in Washington DC and with the phrase “I have a dream” America suddenly woke up and men were made equal. Most libraries and bookstores have entire sections dedicated to the civil rights movement and African-American literature, so when given the task to read another book on the civil rights, this one an autobiography, I found myself saying “So what? How is this going to be any different?”

Coming Of Age in Mississippi is brutal, that's how. It's not brutal in the way of painting startling images in my mind, hoping and praying they aren't as graphic as I picture them. Instead it's filled with brutal commentary, the likes of which has never been shown to me. Anne Moody remembers her time growing up with great detail and she intends to retell this time exactly how it occurred, even at the risk of alienating herself from the civil rights movement the rest of us are taught.

One of the reasons that Coming Of Age In Mississippi succeeds the way it does is because it operates like a story. Anne Moody keeps her tones truthful and real throughout her time growing up and well up into her participation within the civil rights movement. Though her description of her time in Canton, Mississippi are the most telling and effective parts of her story, it is the events that lead her to Canton that perhaps bring a light to the Civil Rights Movement as well or better than other literature I have read. However, the thing that I took away from Moody's story of her early life in Mississippi was not the divide between blacks and whites, but between blacks and other blacks, especially seen from her step-father's family towards her and her mother, “I just didn't see Negroes hating each other so much” (Moody 60). It is through this feeling that Moody especially feels from the “Yellows” that I begin to see the Civil Rights Movement in a bit of a new light. It did not come to be with everyone on the same page, to fight against the oppression at the hands of whites. The Civil Rights Movement illustrates an event that came to be because it was a chance for these same African-Americans to finally unite. Anne tells the stories of her mother trying to please her mother-in-law Miss Pearl, and failing time and again because she was “just a couple shades darker” (60). This spurs more than anything Moody's leap headfirst into the Movement. She is tired of blacks hating blacks, and more than anything wants to change that. Tired of the jealousy that runs through those who have nothing to grab onto, Moody realizes that is not only the whites who are sick, but her black brothers and sisters as well.

Throughout the pages of Coming Of Age In Mississippi Anne Moody keeps the reader engaged through her miraculous life story. She paints herself in an accurate mode as a woman to be admired, someone we can all learn from. However, it is towards the end of the book when Moody makes a sudden realization that is going to make the biggest difference in the Civil Rights Movement yet. When speaking to teen-agers back in Canton, she sees something in them that she has been looking for in the older folks she had been working with for years. When she makes this realization that “They felt the power to change things was in themselves” (371), Anne realizes that everything she has worked for looks like it is going to pay off soon. It is the next step in the story, to be continued. More than anything, Coming Of Age In Mississippi is a story about a society in the midst of evolution, not revolution. It was a long time coming for Anne Moody and though she might not be a part of the change that is about to occur, she helped lead people to that step. If anything is to be learned from Moody's story it is that if we can make a difference as individuals, we will then learn to make a difference as communities. The revolution came because of the evolution of thousands of other Anne Moody's around the country, thousands who “put themselves in the driver's seat.”

A first-hand and painfully honest account of what it was really like to grow up poor in rural Mississippi and then to ‘come of age’ and be a part of the onset of America’s Civil Rights Movement.

Told in first person narrative, this book is like having a conversation with the author, Anne Moody. In fact, if there were audios when this book was published (1968) it would have been a treasure to have had Anne Moody narrate this book. But that’s not to be.

If you’ve read fictionalized accounts of this time period in the South (1940’s to 1960’s), I would highly recommend reading this book, because there is just no comparison. In Anne Moody’s autobiography, you will read of the struggles, the brutality, the sit-ins, the killings, the prejudices, the shear and constant exhaustion, will and determination of those involved in the movement paved the way for change from someone who lived it. It is not a pretty story.

It is still hard for me to comprehend that this blemish on our history was not at all that long ago. In my opinion, this should be required reading for high schools.