Coming Of Age In Mississippi

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorHigh School, 11th grade April 2001

download word file, 7 pages 5.0

"Coming of Age in Mississippi" "Coming of Age in Mississippi"� was an autobiography written by a Negro named Anne Moody. She grew up in a small town named Centerville where poverty mainly struck the blacks. Anne Moody was a courageous woman who challenged her racist society during the mid-decades of the nineties and survived with pride. She endured poverty, threats, arson, police brutality, lynching, rights demonstrations, and violence to prove her point that blacks deserved the same rights and opportunities as whites, that segregation was not okay.

Anne Moody first challenged her society when she was only in fifth grade. When she went to a play with her mother and siblings and discovered that she was not allowed to go into the "white lobby, " Anne began wondering why this was so. This was only the beginning of Anne's long journey through the Civil Rights Movement. Through out her high school years, Anne Moody suffered the unjust consequences of being black.

Her mother and stepfather's wages put together were not enough to support the large Moody family. Consequently, Anne often worked for white people for extremely minimal wages doing domestic work for many hours after the school day had ended. She worked to help support her poor family and to buy school clothes for herself.

The Negroes of Mississippi lived in housing projects that were isolated from the white parts of town. The schools were segregated and children often had poor teachers. Most children didn't even make it to college. They were not given the same opportunity as whites. During high school Anne was affected directly when a Negro from her town named Emmet Till who was murdered for getting out of place with a white women, or so Anne was told. However, she soon found out the truth. Emmet...