Eckard, Paula Gallant. "Moody, Anne." Oxford African American Studies Center.  01. Oxford University Press. Date of access 24 Apr. 2023, 

Moody, Anne 

(b. 1940), civil rights activist and writer.

A version of this article originally appeared in The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature.

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. Coming of Age in Mississippi won the Best Book of the Year Award from the National Library Association. In 1975, Moody published a collection of four short stories, entitled Mr. Death . She currently resides in New York City.

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.