The Coming Of Age In Mississippi By Anne Moody

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The Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody is an autobiography in which she discusses growing up amidst segregation and race wars. During her growth, she realizes that the world is not as simple as she would like. Her life is split into four different parts: childhood, high school, college, and the movement. Each one had a significant impact on how she behaved in the next one. When she was a child, her father left her mother with three small children and no money. Throughout the course of the book, her mother had several more children from Moody’s step-father Raymond. In high school, Moody learned how bad the racism of her time actually was. During college, she joins the NAAPC against her mother’s wishes. When she began her work in the …show more content…

He always complained to her mother or argued about how Essie Mae dressed when she returned from New Orleans after having spent the summer working with drag queens. She became so angry that she told him she was leaving because she was tired of him and his antics. She would enter the living room with the rest of the family and he would get up and leave. Ray locked her out of the house during this fight and would not let her come retrieve her clothes, so she went to get the sheriff to force Ray to let her in. After she grabbed her clothes and had another tussle with her mother, she realized she had no place to go other than back to the main source of her resentment: her …show more content…

When she first started with the NAACP, Ed Cassidy, the sheriff of Centreville, Mississippi advised her to quit otherwise the safety of her family would not be guaranteed. This was very conflicting for Essie Mae because she really wanted to fight for equality, but she was torn about protecting her family. When she really started working with the Civil Rights Movement, she focused most of her time on voter registration and making sure that all black people could and would vote in order to make progress towards equality. Joining the NAACP put an already growing strain on her familial

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