coming of age in mississippi writer moody

Moody also worked as a counselor for the New York City Poverty Program.

The book has received several national awards.Īside from her autobiography, Moody published Mr. From 1964 through 1965, Moody served as the civil rights and project coordinator at Cornell University.īecoming disenchanted with certain aspects of the civil rights movement, Moody moved to New York City, where she began to write her autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi, which was published in 1968. She faced threats of violence and also was put on the Ku Klux Klan's blacklist during this period. Moody worked in Canton, Mississippi, for more than a year with CORE to register African-American voters. She also took part in the 1963 march on Washington, D.C. In 1963, she was one of three young people who staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Jackson. While at Tugaloo, Moody became an activist in the civil rights movement, maintaining involvement with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She then won an academic scholarship to Tugaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, and received a bachelor of science degree in 1964.

She won a basketball scholarship to Natchez Junior College and was in attendance from 1959 through 1961. Through the NAACP and later through CORE and SNCC she has first-hand experience of the demonstrations and sit-ins that were the mainstay of the civil rights movement, and the arrests and jailings, the shotguns, fire hoses, police dogs, billy clubs and deadly force that were used to destroy it.Ī deeply personal story but also a portrait of a turning point in our nation's destiny, this autobiography lets us see history in the making, through the eyes of one of the footsoldiers in the civil rights movement.īorn Essie Mae Moody on September 15, 1940, near Centreville, Mississippi, Moody was the daughter of poor African-American sharecroppers. But now there was.the fear of being killed just because I was black.' In that moment was born the passion for freedom and justice that would change her life.Īn all-A student whose dream of going to college is realized when she wins a basketball scholarship, she finally dares to join the NAACP in her junior year. Before then, she had 'known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. The week before she began high school came the news of Emmet Till's lynching.

Born to a poor couple who were tenant farmers on a plantation in Mississippi, Anne Moody lived through some of the most dangerous days of the pre-civil rights era in the South.

Coming of age in mississippi writer moody