Anne Moody
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Moody, Anne (b. 1940), civil rights activist and writer. Anne Moody was born in 1940, the daughter of sharecroppers. In Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), Moody describes growing up in rural Mississippi where racism, lack of opportunity, and economic failure devastated her family and others in the African American community. The autobiography also chronicles the growth of the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s, thus making the work a record of personal and political importance.
Coming of Age in Mississippi emerges out of a long tradition in African American literature, dating back to the slave narratives of the nineteenth century and continuing with autobiographies of the twentieth century. Moody's work has been compared to Harriet A. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) Mary Church Terrell's A Black Woman in a White World (1940), and Richard Wright's Black Boy (1945)
Part 1 (“Childhood”) concerns Moody's early years and her family's struggles and instability. While Jacobs and Terrell recalled Edenic periods in their early lives, Moody's did not contain such innocence. Even at a young age, Moody recognized the social and economic forces impacting on her family. Like Richard Wright, she questioned the position of superiority and privilege granted to whites, but met with fear and silence from the adults around her. Moody was angered by the apathy and seeming indifference that the black community had toward the inferior social and economic positions assigned to them. The eldest of six children, Moody was particularly aware of the plight of poor black women and their children. Her own mother's struggle to endure harsh field work, equally difficult domestic work, poverty, repeated childbearing, and desertion by her husband becomes an important subject in Moody's autobiography.
Parts 2 and 3 (“High School” and “College”) describe the important role that school and education had in Moody's life. In high school, Moody channeled her anger and confusion into academic achievement and playing basketball. However, high school brought a deepening awareness of the realities of black life in Mississippi. The murder of Emmet Till the week before high school began initiated Moody into these truths. It also brought her a new and devastating fear: “the fear of being killed just because I was black.”
Moody continued her education at Natchez College for two years on a basketball scholarship. She then received a full academic scholarship to Tougaloo College. Here Moody became involved in the NAACP and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Such involvement was fraught with danger for both Moody and her family. However, this did not prevent her full immersion in civil rights activities during her senior year at Tougaloo, described in part 4, “The Movement.”
Moody served as a canvasser and church speaker for the NAACP, participated in boycotts of downtown Jackson, Mississippi, stores, led a sit-in team at a Woolworth's lunch counter, registered voters for the Committee on Racial Equality, and taught workshops on self-protection to potential demonstrators. With vivid detail Moody recounts these activities, as well as the demoralizing impact of the assassinations of Medgar Evers and John F. Kennedy. All told, Coming of Age in Mississippi bears poignant witness to the injustices and evils of segregation in the South and portrays the growth and development of individual social conscience.
Bibliography
- Lynn Z. Bloom, “Coming of Age in the Segregated South: Autobiographies of Twentieth-Century Childhoods, Black and White,” in Home Ground: Southern Autobiography, ed. J. Bill Berry, 1991, pp. 110–122.
- Nellie Y. McKay, “The Girls Who Became Women: Childhood Memories in the Autobiographies of Harriet Jacobs, Mary Church Terrell, and Anne Moody,” in Tradition and the Talents of Women, ed. Florence Howe, 1991, pp. 105–124
Paula Gallant Eckard
Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature:
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Works by Anne Moody
(b. 1940)
| 1968 | Coming of Age in Mississippi. The civil rights activist supplies an important account of life for a black woman in the South from the end of World War II through the civil rights struggles. |
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Anne Moody
Anne Moody (born September 15, 1940) is an African-American author who has written about her experiences growing up poor and black in rural Mississippi, joining the Civil Rights Movement, and fighting racism against blacks in the United States beginning in the 1960s
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Contents
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Life
Born Essie Mae Moody, she was the oldest of nine children. After her parents split up, she grew up with her mother, Elmira aka Toosweet, in Centreville, Mississippi, while her father lived in nearby Woodville. At a young age she began working for white families in the area, cleaning their houses and helping their children with homework for only a few dollars a week, while earning perfect grades in school and helping at church. In the community she often heard stories of interracial sexual abuse, miscegenation, lynching, arson and other acts of racial intimidation. After graduating with honors from a segregated, all-black high school, she attended Natchez Junior College (also all black) in 1961 under a basketball scholarship.
Then she moved on to Tougaloo College on an academic scholarship to earn a bachelor's degree. At Tougaloo, she became involved with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After graduation, Moody became a full-time worker in the Civil Rights Movement, participating in a Woolworth's lunchcounter sit-in and protests in Jackson. During Freedom Summer, she worked for CORE in the town of Canton.
Autobiography
Her autobiography Coming of Age in Mississippi is acclaimed for its realistic portrayal of life for a young African American before and during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
In the memoir, Moody gradually developed a position of leadership. Though she faced male dominance and terror from white supremacists during her days in the struggle, Anne refused the idea of being sheltered and worked as hard as any man did for independence. She fought for the freedom of her race demonstrating that liberation was as important to black women as it was to black men. She made herself known as an activist and stood out as a woman who had her own significant voice. Moody worked in dangerous areas in Mississippi and as her position of power grew, the more threatening her work became. She even sacrificed seeing her family for the sake of the movement. Since she was so well known, she could not return to her hometown without putting her family in danger of being abused by the white law enforcement officials. She used her prominent position to educate others on important racial issues. She worked to help young children receive an education so that when they grew up they would have more opportunities available to them. She worked with teenagers as well, for she believed that they were the ones who were going to make significant changes. The work she did with adults was particularly hard because they were either so set in their ways or too afraid to change the things that Anne questioned. Those who tried to vote or join the civil rights movement were often fired from their jobs or suffered beatings or abuse from white people.
Philosophy
Moody's philosophy as an activist prefigured the black power ideologies that emerged from the nonviolent civil rights. She wanted to take power from the whites and she wanted to encourage other members of the black community to do so as well. She understood though that male dominance was prevalent in the Black Power Movement which would not have allowed her to participate as much as she would have liked. In the non-violent Civil Rights Movement, women were allowed much larger roles than in the Black Power Movement. Anne did not agree with the passivity of the non-violent movement. What she dreamed of was a coupling of the rights women had in the non-violent Civil Rights Movement with the strength of the Black Power movement. Anne did not want any man to take credit for the work that she did. She set a strong example for the women who came after her to follow as they faced continual oppression in the form of the male dominance of the black race.
Post-1968
In 1972 she worked as an artist-in-residence in Berlin. She went on to work at Cornell University and sold a collection of stories in 1975. She has one daughter and does not grant interviews or do public appearances.[1] However she does work as a Counselor for the New York City Poverty Program and lives in the city.
Books
- Coming of Age in Mississippi (Non-Fiction, Autobiography) (1968)
- Mr. Death: Four Stories (1975)
References
- ^ Mississippi Writers & Musicians. Mswritersandmusicians.com. Retrieved on 2011-11-21.
External links
- Gwin, Minrose. "Mourning Medgar: Justice, Aesthetics, and the Local" March 11, 2008. Southern Spaces
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Copyrights:
Oxford Companion to African American Literature
The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Copyright © 2001, 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature
The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Mentioned in
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(American history)
Coming of Age
(disambiguation)
Moody
(surname)
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