Story Of Anne Moody

In America, the fortie s and fifties was a time of racism and racial segregation. The Declaration of Independence states “all men are created equal” and America is viewed as the land of equal opportunity. However, blacks soon found the lack of truth in these statements; and with the Montgomery bus boycott marking the beginning of retaliation, the civil rights movement will grow during the mid – sixties. In the autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody describes the environment, the thoughts, and the actions that formed her life while growing up in the segregated southern state of Mississippi. As a young child, Moody accepted society as the way it was and did not see a difference in the skin color of a white person as opposed to that of a black. It was not until a movie incident did she begin to realize that the color of her skin made her inferior. “Their whiteness provided them with a pass to downstairs in that nice section and my blackness sent me to the balcony. Now that I was thinking about it, their schools, homes, and streets were better than mine.” Soon after Moody entered high school, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago, was killed for whistling at a white woman. “Emmett Till’s murder had proved it was a crime, punishable by death, for a Negro man to even whistle at a white woman in Mississippi.” Although her mother refused to give an explanation of the organization, Moody learned about the NAACP from one of her teachers soon after the incident. It was at age fifteen that Moody really began to hate people. Not only did she hate the whites that committed the murders, but she also hated the blacks for allowing the horrid actions to occur. When there were rumors about black men having sexual relationships with white women, Negro men became afraid even to walk the streets. One of Moody’s high school classmates, Jerry, was beaten after being accused of making telephone calls to a white operator with threats of molesting her. Even more tragic was the Taplin fire. A whole family was burned in the Taplin family home and although the police tried to blame it on a kerosene lamp, the blacks knew it was purposely started with gasoline. To get away from all the horrifying things going on in her town, Moody leaves to stay with family members in Baton Rouge.