Slave Narratives and the Civil Rights Era: Moody and Malcolm X

The Slave Narrative Tradition in Modern Literature

The slave narrative maintains a unique station in modern literature. Unlike any other body of literature, it provides us with a first-hand account of institutionalized, racially motivated human bondage in an ostensibly democratic society. As a reflection on their authors, these narratives were the first expression of humanity by a group of people whom antebellum pseudo-science had deemed mere animals. These works, although they offer keen insight into the nature of the period, all but disappeared following emancipation and the end of the Civil War. As black liberty was thought to be a vindicated cause, the accounts of former slaves lost their general appeal and became part only of a cultural heritage attended to by other freed black people.

However, black writers of both fiction and non-fiction in the 20th century came to reflect the work of Frederick Douglass and others in the style in which they wrote. Anne Moody and Malcolm X reflect this legacy of struggle and redemption through literacy, which they share with other authors of the 20th century such as James Baldwin and Richard Wright.

In the early 1960s, James Baldwin — a homosexual black man writing in self-imposed exile in Paris — made the observation to his nephew that in the hundred years since the Emancipation Proclamation, nothing much had changed for black people. Whether in the Jim Crow–afflicted communities of the South or the ghettos of the urban North, black people remained outside of American society. This idea resonated deeply with blacks in the United States, who launched a protest movement designed to foster inclusion.

James Baldwin and the Context of Black Oppression

This movement included Anne Moody, a young woman in Mississippi, and Malcolm X, a former prisoner and convert to Islam in the North. These writers quickly recognized that blacks in the United States needed to develop a positive identity for themselves, or they would always remain beneath white society in terms of economics and social perception.

Anne Moody portrays Mississippi of the 1950s and 1960s as a land of oppressive whites and complacent Negroes. As an activist affiliated with the NAACP, Moody attempts to break this cycle by participating in a number of sit-ins and other forms of nonviolent protest. Her account is part testimonial and part journalistic; she seeks both to inform her audience of the events that transpired and of the personal effect those events had on her as a young woman.

Moody portrays herself and her companions as rational, intelligent Christian activists. This differs from many accounts by black men growing up in the same environment — narratives that often portray the lives of young men as successive attempts to suppress the violent feelings that accompanied oppression. Moody turns to God and to her friends for strength in hostile situations. Of her experience during a sit-in in which she and several other young women refused to leave their seats at a restaurant, Moody writes:

Anne Moody and Nonviolent Resistance in Mississippi

We kept our eyes straight forward and did not look at the crowd except for occasional glances to see what was going on. All of a sudden I saw a face I remembered — the drunkard from the bus station sit-in. My eyes lingered on him just long enough for us to recognize each other. Today he was drunk too, so I don't think he remembered where he had seen me before. He took out a knife, opened it, put it in his pocket, and then began to pace the floor. At this point, I told Memphis and Pearlena what was going on. Memphis suggested that we pray. We bowed our heads, and all hell broke loose. A man rushed forward, threw Memphis from his seat, and slapped my face. Then another man who worked in the store threw me against an adjoining counter.

Although Moody's reaction to the violent actions of her white oppressors is instinctively angry, she attempts to resolve matters in peaceful ways designed to cast her as the victim of an endemic social ill rather than as an aggressor. White southerners are typically portrayed as violent, intimidating bigots, lacking any explicit merit that would justify the social privileges they demand at the expense of the black population.

Moody's more personal narrative passages reflect her coming to grips with the fact that some people hate her merely because she is black. She writes:

Before Emmett Till's murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me — the fear of being killed just because I was black. This was the worst of my fears. I knew once I got food, the fear of starving to death would leave. I also was told that if I was a good girl, I wouldn't have to fear the Devil or hell. But I didn't know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough.

Whereas much of the book is notable for its eyewitness accounts of civil rights–era conflicts, other parts are equally compelling in that they reveal the effect of bigotry upon children and young adults.

Whereas Moody's work focuses on condemning Mississippi society, Malcolm X reflects the wider-scale condemnation of white America that would come to characterize the latter half of the civil rights era. As Richard Wright had written earlier in Black Boy, many southern blacks migrated north because the North was characterized as an egalitarian haven free of southern-style bigotry — only to become disillusioned after experiencing life in a northern ghetto, where social activity remained just as segregated and economic opportunity for blacks was severely limited.

Malcolm X focuses on reclaiming the pride of black people through Islam and through a rejection of white ideas and culture. He grew up the son of a black preacher in Omaha, Nebraska, from which he escaped as a teenager only to find himself lost in the vice culture of Boston, where he became involved in gambling and prostitution rings. After being imprisoned for burglary, Malcolm discovered Islam through the teachings of Elijah Muhammad. He subsequently moved to Detroit, changed his name, and became the national minister for the Nation of Islam.