Anne Moody's Journey

742 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Anne moody view on national civil rights activist

The first step Moody took on her journey of activism was to join the NAACP and SNCC. The majority of work done by Anne Moody while working for these two organizations was voter registration drives. During Moody’s stay at college, she would often travel to the delta and stay in the Freedom House. Here, Moody and her colleagues would plan and execute the voter registration drives. Moody would also organize rallies. Unfortunately, these rallies were poorly attended, and not much was accomplished. Many Negroes were too afraid to vote and did not attend the rallies because of the threat of losing their jobs. The tactic of making Negroes aware of their civil rights in a nonviolent and passive manner failed from the beginning of Moody’s inception into the Movement.

Moody’s “nonviolent” sit-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter may be her most famous act not just during the Movement, but possibly her life. The idea behind the sit-in was to request service at the segregated lunch counter of Woolworth’s. As the sit-in progressed, the white population became more aware of what was happening, and they started heckling and threatening Moody and her fellow activists. Nonviolence turned to violence when a white man rushed Memphis, one of the sit-in members. He was beaten up and arrested. Moody was dragged out by her hair, and her friend was taken from her seat by force. A few days after the sit-in, a group of Negro ministers went to the mayor with demands. The mayor ignored them. The nonviolent sit-in was supposed to be a message to the community and the country. Unfortunately, the sit-in, in the eyes of Anne Moody, was a failure because it had accomplished nothing. ...

... middle of paper ...

...Canton. She was persuaded to go to Washington and testify about the racism in Mississippi. On the bus, people were singing freedom songs in high spirits. A fellow activist named Gene turned to Moody and said, “We’re gonna git things straight in Washington, huh?” (Moody, 424). She thought to herself, “I wonder. I really wonder” (Moody, 424). The statement shows Moody’s doubts and frustration with the Movement. She had nothing to show for all her hard work in Canton, and there was no progress for equality on a national scale. By this time, Moody believed that more radical and militant action was required in order to gain the civil rights that whites had enjoyed for hundreds of years.

Works Cited

Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi. New York: Bantam Dell, 1968.

Show More
Related

  • Summary Of Anne Moody's Coming Of Age In Mississippi And The Naapi

    1350 Words  | 3 Pages

    She was so motivated about bringing a change that she joint the NAACP when she was in College. Moody and her mother shared a much different view on the Civil Rights Movement. Her mother was contented with the status quo; she just wanted to work, take care of her family, and stay out of trouble. Anne wanted to a change and was ready to fight for it. This difference in opinion created a separation between Anne and her family. When she was in College, NAACP organized their annual convention in Jackson. Her mum sent her a mail forbidding her from attending the convention. She threated Anne that she will kill her herself if she attended the convention. Because of her choice to continue with the movement, she endangered herself and her family and could not return to Centreville safely. Anne was and three other activists were denied service at a restaurant, but they decided to stay at the counter. They were beating and escorted violently outside, where over ninety policemen were standing without saying a word. She endured unbelievable hardship and unfair treatments throughout her life because of her involvement in the Civil Right

    Read More

  • Documentary Analysis: Bridge To Freedom

    262 Words  | 1 Pages

    Here, though, the focus is primarily on the Committee’s voter registration initiative starting in 1964. This documentary provides a more historical perspective, and offers glimpses into the strategies used in Selma, Alabama to obtain social change. It shows how those within the group questioned the effectiveness of the protests and the march, and

    Read More

  • Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi

    1803 Words  | 4 Pages

    In this autobiography of Anne Moody a.k.a. Essie Mae as she is often called in the book, is the struggles for rights that poor black Americans had in Mississippi. Things in her life lead her to be such an activist in the fight for black equality during this time. She had to go through a lot of adversity growing up like being beat, house being burned down, moving to different school, and being abuse by her mom's boyfriend. One incident that would make Anne Moody curious about racism in the south was the incident in the Movie Theater with the first white friends she had made. The other was the death of Emmett Tillman and other racial incidents that would involve harsh and deadly circumstances. These this would make Miss Moody realize that this should not be tolerated in a free world.

    Read More

  • John Lewis Turning Points

    1345 Words  | 3 Pages

    Lewis states, “February 27, 1960 was my first arrest. The first of many” (Lewis and Aydin 1: 103). (See figure 1) John Lewis was not afraid of being arrested for doing the right thing. At this moment, the Nashville students were still trying to desegregate the department store lunch counters. Lewis says, “We wanted to change America-- to make it something different, something better” (Lewis and Aydin 1: 103). All of the students were willing to do what it takes to make a change happen. 82 students went to jail that day alongside with Lewis, they were offered bail however they refused. They did not want to cooperate with the system in any way because the system is what was allowing segregation in the first place. At around 11 p.m. they were all released and had to attend court the next day. They found the students guilty and ordered them to either pay a fine of 50 dollars each, or spend 30 days in jail. Of course they didn’t pay the bail and did their time in jail. As a result, when John Lewis’s parents later on found out he had gone to jail. They were devastated and he had become an embarrassment and a source of humiliation and gossip to the

    Read More

  • Anne Moody Racism

    1601 Words  | 4 Pages

    She said “Before Emmett Till, 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.” Moody’s mother is terrified that Moody knows about the murder because she recognized this awareness of the blatant discrimination and savage violence of whites towards blacks would make young Moody inclined to speak out and act in retaliation. One of the large obstacles that the Civil Rights movement faced in Moody’s later experience was a lack of participation from people like who mother who were so brainwashed by white dominance that they would rather live as inferiors rather than risk meeting the wrath of segregationists. Moody is infuriated by the African-American community’s acceptance of it’s lowly position in society. In one incident later in the book, Moody is giving out donated clothes to black in need, and the immense crowd that shows up maddens her with their hypocrisy. “ ‘Here they are,’ I thought, ‘all standing around waiting to be given something. Last week after the church bombing they turned their heads when they passed this office. … After I give them clothes, they probably won’t even look at me next week, let alone go and register to vote.” Her prediction is correct, as only about 80,000 out of the 400,000 African Americans in Mississippi participate in the Freedom vote, designed to demonstrate

    Read More

  • Coming Of Age In Mississippi Critical Analysis

    1501 Words  | 4 Pages

    Moody sets the ending scene as she and a young boy are on their way to Washington, most likely to the March on Washington. (page 424) “I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes. ‘Moody…’ it was little gene interrupting his singing. ‘Moody we’re gonna git things straight in Washington, huh?’ I didn’t answer him. I knew I didn’t have to. He looked as if he knew exactly what I was thinking. ‘I wonder. I wonder’ We shall overcome, We shall overcome We shall overcome some day. I WONDER. I really WONDER.” When moody ends with this statement of a song used many times in freedom rally’s at the NAACP and the hopefulness of her traveling companion lead us to believe that the end of the Civil rights movement and the end of prejudice of African Americans is near. This assumption that Moody is going to the march on Washington matches with the textbook exactly (pages 278) “In 1963, Dr. King and other Civil Rights leaders organized a March on Washington to pressure Congress to pass the new Civil Rights bill then before Congress…Only a few months after th March on Washington, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. After his tragic assassination, there was a new willingness in Congress to pass legislation he had proposed before his death,” and the hope that the Civil Rights Movement will end in Moody’s last statement also corresponds with our textbook. Due to Anne

    Read More

  • Anne Moody's Involvement in the Civil Rights Movement

    1371 Words  | 3 Pages

    Anne Moody had thought about joining the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but she never did until she found out one of her roommates at Tougaloo college was the secretary. Her roommate asked, “why don’t you become a member” (248), so Anne did. Once she went to a meeting, she became actively involved. She was always participating in various freedom marches, would go out into the community to get black people to register to vote. She always seemed to be working on getting support from the black community, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. Son after she joined the NAACP, she met a girl that was the secretary to the ...

    Read More

  • Analysis of Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi

    1206 Words  | 3 Pages

    Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi is a narrated autobiography depicting what it was like to grow up in the South as a poor African American female. Her autobiography takes us through her life journey beginning with her at the age of four all the way through to her adult years and her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. The book is divided into four periods: Childhood, High School, College and The Movement. Each of these periods represents the process by which she “came of age” with each stage and its experiences having an effect on her enlightenment. She illustrates how important the Civil Rights Movement was by detailing the economic, social, and racial injustices against African Americans she experienced.

    Read More

  • Tallahassee Bus Boycott 1956

    907 Words  | 2 Pages

    On the date May 26, 1956, two female students from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson, had taken a seat down in the whites only section of a segregated bus in the city of Tallahassee, Florida. When these women refused to move to the colored section at the very back of the bus, the driver had decided to pull over into a service station and call the police on them. Tallahassee police arrested them and charged them with the accusation of them placing themselves in a position to incite a riot. In the days after that immediately followed these arrests, students at the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University organized a huge campus-wide boycott of all of the city buses. Their inspiring stand against segregation set an example and an intriguing idea that had spread to tons of Tallahassee citizens who were thinking the same things and brought a change of these segregating ways into action. Soon, news of the this boycott spread throughout the whole entire community rapidly. Reverend C.K. Steele composed the formation of an organization known as the Inter-Civic Council (ICC) to manage the logic and other events happening behind the boycott. C.K. Steele and the other leaders created the ICC because of the unfounded negative publicity surrounding the National Associat...

    Read More

  • Fannie Lou Hamer and Malcolm X

    1027 Words  | 3 Pages

    Fannie Lou Hamer and Malcolm X, like most civil rights activists, were exposed to the horrors of racism on a daily basis. These two leaders in particular, recognized a recurring theme of conscious oppression of Black Americans on the part of white Americans and identified the ways in which the “dominant” social group benefited from such oppression. Fannie Lou Hamer’s experience sharecropping and within the justice system helped her to develop an ideology of civil rights that centered on the empowerment of Black Americans. When Hamer was six years old the owner of the plantation on which her family lived and worked encouraged her to pick cotton. Making it seem like a game or challenge, the owner offered her a reward of food, knowing that the young girl was going hungry as a result of the limited amount of food he supplied to her family. Just like that, Hamer was tricked into picking cotton to earn minimal rewards.2 This anecdote from her life parallels the struggle of many sharecroppers at the time. Released from slavery, Black me...

    Read More

  • Ain't Scared of your Jails

    1527 Words  | 4 Pages

    One of the first documented incidents of the sit-ins for the civil rights movement was on February 1, 1960 in Nashville, Tennessee. Four college African-Americans sat at a lunch counter and refused to leave. During this time, blacks were not allowed to sit at certain lunch counters that were reserved for white people. These black students sat at a white lunch counter and refused to leave. This sit-in was a direct challenge to southern tradition. Trained in non-violence, the students refused to fight back and later were arrested by Nashville police. The students were drawn to activist Jim Lossen and his workshops of non-violence. The non-violent workshops were training on how to practice non-violent protests. John Lewis, Angela Butler, and Diane Nash led students to the first lunch counter sit-in. Diane Nash said, "We were scared to death because we didn't know what was going to happen." For two weeks there were no incidences with violence. This all changed on February 27, 1960, when white people started to beat the students. Nashville police did nothing to protect the black students. The students remained true to their training in non-violence and refused to fight back. When the police vans arrived, more than eighty demonstrators were arrested and summarily charged for disorderly conduct. The demonstrators knew they would be arrested. So, they planned that as soon as the first wave of demonstrators was arrested, a second wave of demonstrators would take their place. If and when the second wave of demonstrators were arrested and removed, a third would take their place. The students planned for multiple waves of demonstrators.

    Read More

  • Turning Points In Anne Moody's Coming Of Age In Mississippi

    922 Words  | 2 Pages

    To the modern white women who grew up in comfort and did not have to work until she graduated from high school, the life of Anne Moody reads as shocking, and almost too bad to be true. Indeed, white women of the modern age have grown accustomed to a certain standard of living that lies lightyears away from the experience of growing up black in the rural south. Anne Moody mystifies the reader in her gripping and beautifully written memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi, while paralleling her own life to the evolution of the Civil Rights movement. This is done throughout major turning points in the author’s life, and a detailed explanation of what had to be endured in the name of equality.

    Read More

  • Success and Failure of the Civil Rights Movement

    1574 Words  | 4 Pages

    Success was a big part of the Civil Rights Movement. Starting with the year 1954, there were some major victories in favor of African Americans. In 1954, the landmark trial Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka Kansas ruled that segregation in public education was unfair. This unanimous Supreme Court decision overturned the prior Plessy vs. Ferguson case during which the “separate but equal” doctrine was created and abused. One year later, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. launched a bus boycott in Montgomery Alabama after Ms. Parks was arrested for not giving up her seat in the “colored section”. This boycott, which lasted more than a year, led to the desegregation of buses in 1956. Group efforts greatly contributed to the success of the movement. This is not only shown by the successful nature of the bus boycott, but it is shown through the success of Martin Luther King’s SCLC or Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The conference was notable for peacefully protesting, nonviolence, and civil disobedience. Thanks to the SCLC, sit-ins and boycotts became popular during this time, adding to the movement’s accomplishments. The effective nature of the sit-in was shown during 1960 when a group of four black college students sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in hopes of being served. While they were not served the first time they commenced their sit-in, they were not forced to leave the establishment; their lack of response to the heckling...

    Read More

  • Nonviolent Protests: An argumentative essay

    1414 Words  | 3 Pages

    From the Boston Tea Party of 1773, the Civil Rights Movement and the Pro-Life Movement of the 1960s, to the Tea Party Movement and Occupy Wall Street Movement of current times, “those struggling against unjust laws have engaged in acts of deliberate, open disobedience to government power to uphold higher principles regarding human rights and social justice” (DeForrest, 1998, p. 653) through nonviolent protests. Perhaps the most well-known of the non-violent protests are those associated with the Civil Rights movement. The movement was felt across the south, yet Birmingham, Alabama was known for its unequal treatment of blacks and became the focus of the Civil Rights Movement. Under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, African-Americans in Birmingham, began daily demonstrations and sit-ins to protest discrimination at lunch counters and in public facilities. These demonstrations were organized to draw attention to the injustices in the city. The demonstrations resulted in the arrest of protesters, including Martin Luther King. After King was arrested in Birmingham for taking part in a peaceful march to draw attention to the way that African-Americans were being treated there, their lack of voter rights, and the extreme injustice they faced in Alabama he wrote his now famous “Letter from Birmingham.”

    Read More

  • The Role of African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement

    2574 Words  | 6 Pages

    Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson, and David J. Garrow. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: the Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson. Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1987. Print.

    Read More

More about Anne Moody's Journey

Open Document