Hostile whites in Moody’s hometown of Centreville, Mississippi even threatened to kill her if she ever returned. Meanwhile, for decades, Southern media outlets and public institutions shunned “Coming of Age in Mississippi” and Anne Moody herself. He called the memoir “a history of our time, seen from the bottom up, through the eyes of someone who decided for herself that things had to be changed.” Still, he regretted that the book did not mention recent advances, like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which enabled the election of several black public officials in Moody’s own hometown. Others, however, read Moody’s experiences of racism as simply one chapter in a current and ongoing struggle – “the sickening story of the way it still is for thousands who are black in the American South,” as Robert Colby Nelson wrote for The Christian Science Monitor. Many in her home state, however, spurned it. Photographer Fred Blackwell captured a now-iconic image of this day, with Moody seated in the middle. 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.

Coming of age in mississippi