Coming of Age in Mississippi

"I was fifteen years old when I began to hate people. I hated the white men who murdered Emmett Till and I hated all the other whites who were responsible for the countless murders I vaguely remember from childhood... But I also hated Negroes. I hated them for not standing up and doing something about the murders... I had a stronger resentment toward Negroes for letting the whites kill them then toward the whites." (129) This was the sort of attitude that made Anne fight for black rights. She worked through out the prime years of her life to encourage blacks to stand up for themselves and get the rights that were declared theirs since the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments were passed. Anne believed that the Negroes had to give some meaning to those amendments and fight for their "inalienable" rights.

It was in college when Anne became active in the Civil Rights Movement. After graduating high school, Anne attended Natchez College for 2 years in which she was mainly sheltered from the outside world. After Natchez, Anne attended Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. Within her first semester at Tougaloo, Anne had become a member of the NAACP. This was very dangerous for her to do and she thought: "The more I remembered the killings, beatings, and intimidations, the more I worried about what might possibly 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." (248) Shortly after, Anne Moody also became involved with the SNCC (Student Non- Violent Coordinating Committee) through a girl living in her dormitory.

Anne Moody became immersed in the voter registration drives and canvassed through out areas in Mississippi. The SNCC members were extremely committed to their cause and the full- time workers were only paid ten dollars a week (252). The whites often threatened them and their offices were even bombed several times. Unfortunately, though the canvassers were very persistent, they did not have much success. "Many Negroes were afraid to come (to the registration drives).... Negroes had been brainwashed so by the whites, they really thought that only whites were supposed to vote..." (253) Anne Moody encountered this type of situation innumerable times throughout her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. Nonetheless, Anne still persisted to challenge the unjust society in which she lived.

She would not give up. Anne Moody was involved in her first sit-in during her senior year in college. John Salter, the head of the NAACP activities at the Tougaloo campus, asked her to be the spokesman for a team that would sit in at a Woolworth's lunch counter, which was segregated at the time. Anne knew she would go to jail for doing this, but she did it anyway. A white mob formed around Anne and her friends as they sat at the lunch counter. The mob threw stuff at the demonstrators, smeared food on them, shouted anti- Negro slogans at them, spray painted "Nigger" on their backs, etc. Anne and the other demonstrators would not budge though until the police came. Anne Moody came away from this experience thinking her society was "sick." (267) The Mississippi Whites believed so much in the segregated Southern way of life, they would kill to preserve it.

Eventually, Anne was on the Ku Klux Klan's black list. This occurred when she became involved with the CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) organization in Canton, a town in Mississippi where Negroes often turned up dead. Anne and her workers went to Canton to start a voter registration campaign. They had some success until the whites threatened the Negroes by shooting 5 high school students that were helping CORE canvass around the Canton area. Anne encountered setbacks such as this through out the campaign, however she remained persistent. In the summer of 1964 the SNCC launched the Mississippi Summer project, more popularly known as, Freedom Summer Anne Moody was very involved in this project in Canton. In the end only 40,000 Negroes voted in this mock election out of 800,000 (224). What Anne discovered from this was that the Negroes were not going to speak out against the whites because the whites gave them jobs and food. Negroes were scared to find out if they could make it on their own. Like the old proverb says, "Don't bite the hand that feeds you." This is what Southern society was like. Coming of Age in Mississippi ends with Anne and a group of Negroes going to Washington to testify against the abuse and cruelties they had suffered. However, the Civil Rights Movement did not end here.

Coming of Age in Mississippi was a very realistic portrayal of life in the South during the mid-decades of the twentieth century. Through out the Deep South, civil rights activists, such as Anne Moody, and freedom writers who traveled through the South registering African Americans to vote and integrating public places were met with beatings, bombings, and murder by white extremists. In the early 1900's and late 1800's the southern states enacted laws that made it nearly impossible for blacks to vote, leaving political power exclusively in white hands. One common provision was the poll tax, a fee charged for the privilege of voting that barred poor people from the voter rolls. Some southern states also required registrants who could not read to interpret a section of the constitution after it was read to them. Most whites that went to register did not have to take the test, because of new "grandfather clauses" exempting those who had voted - or who had ancestors who had voted - before 1867.

Social customs that separated the races in every aspect of daily life also began to be put into law, as well as to set an identity for the South as a progressively backward society that was unable to reminiscent of a forgotten era. . These laws were called Jim Crow laws and segregated typical places, such as railroad stations. Even soft-drink vending machines were segregated. Eventually, these laws were challenged, however federal authority supported the Jim Crow laws. This led to the consequence of race separation being expanded to every aspect of southern life. In the years that followed, parks, playgrounds, ticket windows, hospitals, swimming pools, and other facilities were built for segregated use. The Court also upheld poll taxes, literacy tests, understanding clauses, and grandfather clauses.

What can be learned from this time period is that oppression of any type - racial, cultural, or economical - is unjustifiable. The determination of the Negro population can only be admired and respected. The unity of the blacks during the Civil Rights Movement has proven that no matter of great interest to people like Anne Moody, Alice Walker, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglas, W. E. B. Dubois, and Booker T. Washington. Writers and public figures such as these devoted their lives to creating a unifying identity of the African-American people through their literary works and political actions. Moody understood that the only way to mobilize the interests of the Negro population was to get them to believe in their own plight and future advancement. By publishing the events that occurred in her lifetime allowed her communicate to her readers that they need to stand together and speak out if they wanted to separate themselves from the ideals set forth by the old south.

These literary works have generally encouraged the black culture to flourish. The line separating blacks from whites economically, socially, and politically have been diminished. The term "Land of the Free" is now being applied to the African Americans thanks to courageous writers

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