What Is The Impact Of Anne Moody Life On The Plantation

Anne Moody’s life as an activist began on the Mr.Carter’s plantation, a plantation owner that her parents were renting land from. Anne Moody came from an family of farmers, like many other African Americans living in the south. Farming was the only skill that many African Americans knew how to do well because their entire lives were on plantations where they grew and harvested crops. Thus, sharecropping became the norm for African American families living in the south but this system differed little from the former slavery system. African Americans were still dependent upon wealthy, Anglo-Saxon plantation owners for land, and for their own economic livelihood. Similar to Anne Moody’s life on the plantation, many African Americans did not
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Carter’s luxurious kingdom. “The electric lights were coming on in Mr. Carter's big white house as all the Negro shacks down in the bottom began to fade with the darkness. Once it was completely dark, the lights in Mr. Carter's house looked even brighter, like a big lighted castle. It seemed like the only house on the whole plantation”( Moody 1976, 1-3). The 13th Amendment was suppose to liberate African Americans from bondage. It was suppose to improve the lives of slaves so that they would no longer be treated as objects, as inferiors to their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. However, Anne Moody’s comparison of her living space and Mr.Carter’s castle paints a painfully obvious reality. African Americans were still inferior to their Anglo-Saxon counterparts because they were living in the dark shacks whereas the wealthy plantation owners were living in brightly lit castles. Similar to the former system of slavery, African Americans were kept in the dark, stripped of their basic rights, and forced to endure disproportionate hardships. Anne Moody and her mother also had to endure other hardships. Her shack was burned down, her father began to develop a gambling addiction and had an affair for a mulatto woman named
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Both Moody and Martin Luther King, along with many other social activist leaders, were victims of a biased social media outlet. Social activists and other advocates for an equal and fair society were labeled as rebels, agitators, and other terms that would degrade or downplay the true intentions of said advocates. Violence and brutality would definitely spark an outrage throughout the nation and would probably be retaliated with the use of military force, these political leaders had to get smart with their tactics. “Since police brutality was the last thing wanted in good, respectable Jackson, Mississippi, whenever arrested demonstrators refused to walk to a paddy wagon, garbage truck, or whatever was being used to take people to jail, Negro trusties from Jackson's city jail carted them away. Captain Ray and his men would just stand back with their hands folded, looking innocent as lambs for the benefit of the Northern reporters and photographers”( Moody 1976, 241). And this was an effective strategy deployed to sway public support towards the strategy employed by oppressive state government. Winning the public’s support was necessary because it meant that the state could harass and torture civil rights activists without suffering percussion or public backlash because their actions were “justified”. “The cops had rifles and wore steel helmets... The first twenty of us were