Coming Of Age In Mississippi By Anne Moody

Anne Moody wrote the autobiography Coming of Age in Mississippi where it begins in 1944 highlighting the struggles of her childhood as it progresses to her adult life in 1964. Moody sought a different path than the rest of her family which led her to be apart of the civil right movement that occurred.

Coming of age in Mississippi starts by introducing the narrator of the story, Essie Mae. She discusses her childhood where her father left their family for another woman, and her mother struggles providing for her family. Essie Mae had a traumatic experience in her time on the plantation to where in her adult life she was “still haunted by dreams of the time we lived on Mr.Carter’s plantation.” There her and her little sister, Adline, was abused

Miss Adam’s, the dean’s secretary, and Anne get into a power battle. Anne also gets into a battle with the school’s lunch lady Miss Harris, who knew the food was spoiled and had maggots in it but still fed it to the children. She protests the food and the president of the school agrees with Anne in both circumstances she’s faced with authority. The president helped encourage Anne to try for scholarships for a new college and their meeting and “the following week, the registrar from Tougaloo College, the best senior college in the state for Negroes, came down. I took the test, and a week before school ended, I received notice that I had received a full-tuition scholarship.” (pg.258). There she met Trotter, the secretary of NAACP campus chapter. Moody had gotten flashbacks of the people she heard of or knew who was affiliated with the NAACP and what terrible things had happened to them, yet “the more I remembered the killings, beatings, and intimidations, the more I worried what might possible 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.”

Toosweet hears about Anne’s involvement with the organization and tells Anne to quit because she is “scared some white in my hometown would try to do something to me.”(283). Anne decided to do a protest by sitting in at a bus stop, therefore almost getting herself killed by a unknown group of white men. Moody joins a movement for black voter registration and is turned away from her family when her life becomes endangered due to white supremacists like the KKK trying to kill her. As she graduates from college her family doesn’t come to congratulate her but her sister Adline shows her emotion by sending her a green dress. Mckinley is murdered by a gunman right in from of the activists and puts Moody in a state of questions if things for black people will ever