Analysis Of Coming Of Age In Mississippi By Anne Moody

Coming of Age in Mississippi is a very insightful memoir by the Civil Rights activist Anne Moody. Moody was a strong woman who had been subjected to the unfortunate position of being a poor black girl in the South throughout her life. However, she always found a way to persevere through the struggles she faced. Just a few of these struggles included being black, poor, looking older than the age she really was, and standing up for herself and what she believed in. When in college, she joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and other organizations like the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) (Moody 273). By joining these organizations, she fought not only against the Jim Crow laws that were still in place

The period of time where sharecropping was common among not only blacks but poor whites as well, was basically anywhere from after the Civil War (1861-1865) to the 1960s (“People and Events: Sharecropping in Mississippi”). For many years, her parents worked and they had three children together: Anne (originally named Essie Mae), Adeline, and Junior. When Anne’s mother was pregnant with Junior, her father began to spend less time at home. Eventually, he left their family, which caused her mother much stress because she was not able to care for all of them with what little money they had and their family had to move in with an aunt of theirs. This part of her story did not surprise me very much because, in class, I learned that it was actually very common for men, especially black ones, were prone to leaving their families for one reason or another, mainly because of the stress placed on them as parents to help afford care for their families. This stress mainly came from the fact that sharecroppers didn’t make very much profit from their jobs because they not only had to give a percentage of their crops to their boss but also pay for other fees throughout the year