Anne Moody and Coming of Age

Anne Moody was born in Centreville, Mississippi, in nineteen forty, the daughter of sharecroppers. She came of age in the Delta, in the world of cotton and tenant farming and Jim Crow in its most explicit, most practiced forms. She was a teenager when Emmett Till was murdered in the summer of nineteen fifty-five. She was old enough to understand what that meant about the world she was living in. She enrolled at Tougaloo College in nineteen sixty-one on an academic scholarship.

Tougaloo was different from anything she had known. It was a place where faculty members said out loud what she had been thinking. It was a place where the civil rights movement was not an abstraction but a set of decisions being made by people she knew. She joined the NAACP chapter, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She sat in demonstrations. She canvassed for voter registration in rural Mississippi, driving out to counties where people had been killed for less.

On May twenty-eighth, nineteen sixty-three, she was one of the four people who walked into the Capitol Street Woolworth's and sat at the lunch counter. She stayed for three hours while a mob attacked her and the others. Mustard was poured on her head. She held her position.

She wrote Coming of Age in Mississippi, published in nineteen sixty-eight. It remains one of the most direct and honest first-person accounts of the civil rights movement from inside the state that was the hardest place to do that work. The book does not end triumphantly. It ends on a bus, heading north, singing "We Shall Overcome," and the narrator is not sure she believes it. That uncertainty is part of what makes the book irreplaceable.