During a freedom march on May 29, 1964 in Canton, Mississippi a boy by the name of McKinley Hamilton was brutally beaten by police to the point of unconsciousness. One of the witnesses of this event, and the author of the autobiography which this paper is written in response to, was Anne (Essie Mae) Moody. This event was just one of a long line of violent experiences of Moody’s life; experiences that ranged from her own physical domestic abuse to emotional and psychological damage encountered daily in a racist, divided South. In her autobiography Moody not only discusses in detail the abuses in her life, but also her responses and actions to resist them. The reader can track her progression in these strategies throughout the various stages of her life; from innocent childhood, to adolescence at which time her views from a sheltered childhood began to unravel and finally in adulthood when she took it upon herself to fight back against racial prejudice.
As a child, Moody was sheltered by her parents from the racial violence that was so prominent in the southern United States. However, she was subjected to domestic abuse and physiological violence growing up. Her parents both worked as farmers, so as a result Moody and her sibling, later siblings, were often left alone during the days. During these times they were often looked after by their young uncle George Lee who, still being a child himself caused a lot of torment for Anne and her sister, leading to one of the few times where her dad physically beat her. When she started school at the age of five the threat of physical violence against her followed. Her teacher, Reverend Cason, threatened the students with violence if they misbehaved although “[h]e never did whip [Anne]. [...
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...aced with tremendous abuse and violence in various forms. However as she matured, her awareness of the specific racial violence, rampant throughout the region, grew as did her method of combating and resisting it. In the end, no matter which method she used to resist this violence, whether it be through ignoring it or actively fighting against it, it always found a way to impact her. Although, similar to the sources used for our second paper, Anne’s account of events in her life has never been fully verified and the fact that she can clearly remember events and dialog from such a young age can breed a lot of skepticism. This could also be seen as a sign of just how effected she was by the various forms of violence throughout her life, long after any physical scars had healed.
Works Cited
Moody, A. (1968) Coming of Age in Mississippi. New York, NY: Bantam Dell
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In “ ‘It Was Like All of Us Had Been Raped’: Sexual Violence, Community Mobilization, and the African American Freedom Struggle” by Danielle L. McGuire, McGuire begins her piece with a haunting tale of the rape of Betty Jean Owens, that really illustrates the severity of racial brutality in the 1950s. She depicts a long history of african-american women who refuse to remain silent, even in the face of adversity, and even death, and who've left behind a testimony of the many wrong-doings that have been done to them. Their will to fight against the psychological and physical intimidation that expresses male domination and white supremacy is extremely admirable. The mobilization of the community, and the rightful conviction of the 4 white men most definitely challenged ideologies of racial inequality and sexual domination, and inspired a revolution in societal
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Work and racial consciousness are themes during the Civil Rights Movement that made Anne Moody’s autobiography a unique story. Her amazing story gave the reader a great deal of insight on what it was like to live in rural Mississippi in the middle of a Civil Rights Movement. As an African American woman, she also provided the reader on how her gender and race impacted her life. Coming to Age in Mississippi was an awe-inspiring autobiography of the life of Anne Moody, and provided a lot of information about the social and political aspects of what was going on during her life.
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