Coming of Age in Mississippi Moody\'s Book

Coming of Age in Mississippi

Racial Inequality and Civil Rights Movement in Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi

Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi is one of the most important autobiographical stories from the Civil Rights Era that is widely read today. The book covers Moody's nineteen years of life. The story begins when Moody was four years old and concludes with her participation in a march against racial inequality when she was twenty three. Moody tells her story of growing up in Mississippi and her struggles against racial inequality during the Civil Rights era. As Moody demonstrates, African-Americans in Mississippi faced racial inequality in virtually all areas: political, social, and economic. But while Moody discusses political and social inequality that African-Americans suffered from, she specifically emphasizes how destructive economic inequality was. She became somewhat disillusioned with Civil Rights Movement because Civil Rights activists primarily addressed political and social rights whereas their activism failed to improve the economic conditions of African-Americans in Mississippi and the rest of the United States.

Moody tells in the book how she became conscious of social inequality when she was a child. She recalls how she could play with white children as a young child without any significant consciousness of race. But the situation changed when she tried to enter a movie theater with her white playmates at the age of seven. Moody was dragged out of the white section of the theater by her mother. Her mother scolded her saying that it was unacceptable to break the etiquette of racial norms. After the incident, Moody explains, her white playmates stopped playing with her. She then realized that "not only were they better than me because they were white, but everything they owned and everything connected with them was better than what was available to me. I hadn't realized before that downstairs in the movies was any better than upstairs. But now I saw that it was. Their whiteness provided them with a pass to downstairs in that nice section and my blackness sent me to the balcony" (Moody 33-34). As she grew up, Moody began to realize that all the public places in the state were segregated, relegating African-Americans to a second-class citizenship.

Inequality based on race was so embedded in the society that African-Americans were not immune to the destructive effects of racial prejudice against each other either. It was widely accepted among them that the lighter one's skin was the higher one's place was in the society. Moody resented how her family from the father's side looked down upon her mother because of skin color differences. In one place, she writes: "Then I began to think about Miss Pearl and Raymond's people and how they hated Mama and for no reason at all then the fact that she was a couple of shades darker than the other members of their family. Yet they were Negroes and we were also Negroes. I just didn't see Negroes hating each other so much" (Moody 59). In other words, racial prejudices were absurd, but it was nevertheless part of the social matrix in the state of Mississippi.

On a political level, inequality affected African-Americans harshly. They lacked civil rights such as the right to vote, independent judiciary, or the ability to run for public offices in the state. The NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples) was banned in Mississippi. Moody was especially moved by the vigilante murder of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago who was killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman. The murderers were not properly punished by the justice system but the Mississippi newspaper nevertheless widely stated that the Court had handled the issue appropriately. Moody was distressed with the inaction and hopelessness of African-Americans. When she inquired about the murder of Emmet Till, they remained quiet and urged her to do the same. Her mother was against her involvement with NAACP and other Civil Rights organizations. Although Moody was disappointed with the behavior of other African-Americans, she eventually began to empathize with them because they did not want to lose even the severely limited rights they had.

The inability of African-Americans to challenge the political and social inequality was primarily rooted in grinding poverty they suffered from. African-Americans were so poor that they were afraid that joining Civil Rights Movement would further impoverish them and perhaps lead to starvation. Moody's family was also poor and she offers colorful comparisons between the economic conditions of Whites and Blacks. "It was the first time I had seen the inside of a white family's kitchen," Moody says, talking about the house where her mother worked as a maid. "That kitchen was pretty, all white and shiny. Mama had cooked that food we were eating too. 'If Mama only had a kitchen like this of her own,' I thought, 'she would cook better food for us'" (Moody 29). She began to see this glaring inequality as a child. She was initially angry with many African-Americans for being politically passive but later in her life Moody realized that struggling for civil rights was not their priority. First and foremost, African-Americans of Mississippi wanted bread and butter.