Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody

Analysis on Coming of Age in Mississippi

Coming of Age in Mississippi is a narrated autobiography of the African-American woman Anne Moody. Moody was extremely poor and grew up in poverty. Moody had been significantly involved in the struggles for equality and fair justice to the people. Moody was active in nonviolent struggles but often faced with impossible situations. Her autobiography guides through her life journey beginning with her at the age of four all the way through to her adult years and the positive involvement she had towards the Civil Rights Movement (Andrews, pp.96-105).

Anne Moody grew up in poor circumstances and later fought for the justice. Moody was born in Mississippi in 1940. She was the oldest child of her parents and learned at the precise initial stage about the difficulties of life. Her parents ended up in divorce when she was little. Moody moved with her mother into a small town of Centreville.

From early childhood, she contributed her income for the living of her family. When Anne received a scholarship for her college, she was happy as she could be able to escape from Centreville. She was mainly shocked by the killings of black citizens that had been going on again and again. At college, she discovered the CORE activist groups. She quickly became one of the most active members and fought for African-Americans right to vote (Andrews, pp.145-155).

Moody faced a horrible time while she was in the job from a chicken factory, to the picking of cotton in the field. Moody found task certainly humiliating, being the former slave who harvests so much cotton just to earn a little amount of money. Moody had terrible days of slavery. Moody's family lived in such poor conditions, all the older black people were so intimidated that seemed almost impossible to make a proper move towards the betterment of life. Seen as a whole, they can help explain Moody's lack of optimism as expressed at the end of Coming of Age in Mississippi and her departure from the civil rights movement, which had already occurred by the time she wrote her autobiography.

System Discrimination In Work, So Hard To Dismantle

The racial oppression that Moody describes is insidious because it is so pervasive a part of southern society. Mississippi is a state where a member of the legislature can kill an African American "without provocation" and still be found to have acted in self-defense. The majority of adult African Americans, in Centreville and other rural areas, have come to accept this oppression and try to avoid bringing the anger of the whites upon themselves. They often speak of African Americans who have been killed by whites as going on to a better place in heaven. As a young child, Moody hears adults talking about "Negroes found floating in a river or dead somewhere with their bodies riddled with bullets." The only explanation given to her is that an "Evil Spirit" killed these people. Moody is left to ...