Christy's Reviews > Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Classic Autobiography of a Young Black Girl in the Rural South

Anne Moody's autobiography is a very matter-of-factly told tale of, as the title indicates, growing up in Mississippi. Particularly, Moody reveals the difficulties inherent in growing up poor and black in Mississippi in the mid-twentieth century.

The first half of the book is devoted to her childhood and high school years and is at times somewehat uninteresting (I don't really care about her winning Homecoming Queen, for instance), but it does show really clearly the depths of poverty that many African American families descended to in the absence of real freedom and real jobs. Despite my hesitations about the first half of the book, those personal elements that I find less than interesting are not unimportant to the development of the latter part of the book. Because of the audience's knowledge of Anne Moody's inner life and personal trials and triumphs, readers are better able to identify with her and to see her struggles as real, rather than exaggerated or specific to her alone.

The second half of the book is much more interesting. When she goes away to college, she gets involved with the NAACP, CORE, and the SNCC and begins her political work. During and after college, she takes part in sit-ins, helps to organize voter registration drives, and spends a year working in Mississippi despite poverty, hunger, and continual death threats. The chapters that tell this part of her story serve as a valuable document of the practical elements of the Civil Rights movement. It's easy to hear of Martin Luther King, Jr., and to read Malcolm X's autobiography and to get caught up in the grand ideas of the Civil Rights movement, meanwhile forgetting about the grassroots organization required to support those big ideas and overlooking all the other people involved in the movement. The courage of those willing to risk their lives and their sanity in order to help create a better world is undeniable, and Anne Moody proves herself to be one of those courageous people who give hope to the rest of us.

However, the book does not end on an optimistic note. Published in 1968, Moody's autobiography only reaches 1964. This is significant because at the end of the book Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., are still alive, but by the time the book was published, Malcolm X had been assassinated and Martin Luther King, Jr., had been recently assassinated or would be soon (depending on when in 1968 the book was published). This reflects a significant change in the political climate and in the tone of the Civil Rights movement between the events described and the publication of the book. Moody uses this shift to help make her political argument. She has said that she saw herself as an activist, not a writer, when she wrote this book, and the conclusion of the autobiography proves this. The Anne Moody of 1964 speaks to the audience of 1968 to question the efficacy of nonviolent methods and the value of appealing to the federal government for help (when their policies and practices have caused many of the problems and continued to cause social and economic inequities even when the laws regarding segregation were changed) and to call attention to the necessity for all people to keep working toward a solution (not just public figures or middle-class blacks). The final lines are filled with doubt and, in their doubt and disillusionment, force the reader to evaluate his or her own confidence or doubt. Is Moody right to doubt the movement? Is she right to wonder whether going to Washington to protest will create change? And if she is right, then what should be done? Her book is a blunt reminder of the people who live in poverty and suffer the most from racism (whether that racism comes from individuals or the government) and a call to action that insists that talk is not enough.