At the Woolworth’s in Jackson, Mississippi, white men shoved Moody off her stool, dragged her across the floor by her hair and, when she crawled back, smeared her with ketchup, sugar and mustard. In 1963, Moody became infamous in Mississippi after she challenged racial segregation in what would be the era’s most violent lunch-counter sit-in. Amid such horrors, Moody feared a nervous breakdown. “But now there was … the fear of being killed just because I was black.”Ĭloser to home, whites ran her cousin out of town, brutally beat a classmate, and burned an entire family alive in their home. “Before Emmett Till’s murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil,” she wrote. That mystery remained unsolved when, in 1955, Moody learned that white men had killed a black boy her age just a few hours’ drive north. As a child, she chopped and picked cotton, cleaned houses for white people, and wondered why whites had better everything - better bathrooms, better schools and better seats in the movie theater. In spare, direct prose, she takes readers into the world of African-American sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South.

Written when Moody was 28 years old, “Coming of Age” is a gripping story. Ted Kennedy wrote in 1969, “If things are somewhat different, then they are not different enough.” or does it instead show us that, as former Sen. Does it signal dramatic progress on race relations in the U.S. Read each year by thousands of high school and college students, it remains a Random House backlist best-seller - a title that continues to sell with little to no marketing.Īs I research Anne Moody’s life for my upcoming biography, I often wonder what her memoir’s continued popularity means. It spoke to the day’s pressing issues - poverty, race and civil rights - with an urgent timeliness.įifty years later, the book still commands a wide readership. This article was originally published on The Conversation.Ī rare exception is Anne Moody’s “Coming of Age in Mississippi,” which was published in 1968.

Moody coming of age in mississippi