{"id":13898,"date":"2018-10-07T01:13:56","date_gmt":"2018-10-07T01:13:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=13898"},"modified":"2018-10-12T01:18:05","modified_gmt":"2018-10-12T01:18:05","slug":"coming-of-age-in-mississippi-still-speaks-to-nations-racial-discord-50-years-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/coming-of-age-in-mississippi-still-speaks-to-nations-racial-discord-50-years-later\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Coming of Age in Mississippi’ still speaks to nation’s racial discord, 50 years later"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leigh Ann Wheeler<\/a>, Binghamton University, State University of New York<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Most memoirs are soon forgotten.<\/p>\n

A rare exception is Anne Moody\u2019s \u201cComing of Age in Mississippi,\u201d which was published in 1968. It spoke to the day\u2019s pressing issues \u2013 poverty, race and civil rights \u2013 with an urgent timeliness.<\/p>\n

Fifty years later, the book still commands a wide readership. Read each year by thousands of high school and college students, it remains a Random House backlist best-seller \u2013 a title that continues to sell with little to no marketing.<\/p>\n

As I research Anne Moody\u2019s life for my upcoming biography, I often wonder what her memoir\u2019s continued popularity means. Does it signal dramatic progress on race relations in the U.S. \u2013 or does it instead show us that, as former Sen. Ted Kennedy wrote in 1969, \u201cIf things are somewhat different, then they are not different enough.\u201d <\/p>\n

Till\u2019s death opens Moody\u2019s eyes<\/h2>\n

Written when Moody was 28 years old, \u201cComing of Age\u201d is a gripping story. In spare, direct prose, she takes readers into the world of African-American sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South. As a child, she chopped and picked cotton, cleaned houses for white people, and wondered why whites had better everything \u2013 better bathrooms, better schools and better seats in the movie theater. <\/p>\n

That mystery remained unsolved when, in 1955, Moody learned that white men had killed a black boy her age just a few hours\u2019 drive north. The killing felt personal. <\/p>\n

\u201cBefore Emmett Till\u2019s murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil,\u201d she wrote<\/a>. \u201cBut now there was \u2026 the fear of being killed just because I was black.\u201d <\/p>\n

Closer to home, whites ran her cousin out of town, brutally beat a classmate, and burned an entire family alive in their home. Amid such horrors, Moody feared a nervous breakdown.<\/p>\n

But she resolved to resist.<\/p>\n

In 1963, Moody became infamous in Mississippi after she challenged racial segregation in what would be the era\u2019s most violent lunch-counter sit-in. At the Woolworth\u2019s in Jackson, Mississippi, white men shoved Moody off her stool, dragged her across the floor by her hair and, when she crawled back, smeared her with ketchup, sugar and mustard. <\/p>\n

Photographer Fred Blackwell captured a now-iconic image of this day, with Moody seated in the middle.<\/p>\n

\n \"\"<\/a>
\n Anne Moody endures harassment from a crowd of whites at a Woolworth\u2019s in Jackson, Miss.<\/span>
\n Fred Blackwell\/Jackson Daily News, via Associated Press<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the early 1960s, Moody worked tirelessly as an organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality<\/a> in Canton, Mississippi. But after facing daily death threats, she fled to the North, where she moved from city to city, raising money for the movement.<\/p>\n

At each stop, she described what it was like to come of age, as a black woman, in Mississippi. At one, she shared a stage with baseball great Jackie Robinson, who urged her to write down her story. <\/p>\n

So she did.<\/p>\n

Readers react<\/h2>\n

After \u201cComing of Age in Mississippi\u201d was published, the response was split.<\/p>\n

Some readers viewed the book as \u2013 in the words of one reviewer for The New Republic \u2013 a \u201cmeasure of how far we have come.\u201d To them, the worst of racism was over, and Moody\u2019s account served as a stark reminder of how bad things once were.<\/p>\n

\n \"\"
\n Many readers praised Moody\u2019s story. Many in her home state, however, spurned it.<\/span>
\n Dell<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Others, however, read Moody\u2019s experiences of racism as simply one chapter in a current and ongoing struggle \u2013 \u201cthe sickening story of the way it still is for thousands who are black in the American South,\u201d as Robert Colby Nelson wrote for The Christian Science Monitor. <\/p>\n

Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy read it both ways. <\/p>\n

He called the memoir \u201ca history of our time, seen from the bottom up, through the eyes of someone who decided for herself that things had to be changed.\u201d Still, he regretted that the book did not mention recent advances, like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which enabled the election of several black public officials in Moody\u2019s own hometown.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, for decades, Southern media outlets and public institutions shunned \u201cComing of Age in Mississippi\u201d and Anne Moody herself. Hostile whites in Moody\u2019s hometown of Centreville, Mississippi even threatened to kill her if she ever returned.<\/p>\n

How much has really changed?<\/h2>\n

By contrast, today, \u201cComing of Age\u201d shows up on high school and college reading lists throughout the South, and Anne Moody appears among 21 authors pictured on the Mississippi Literary Map<\/a>. Her crumbling childhood home sits on the recently renamed Anne Moody Street, and Anne Moody Memorial Highway<\/a> now connects Centreville and Woodville, the town where she graduated from high school.<\/p>\n

In Moody\u2019s day, local public officials were all white. Now they more closely reflect the county\u2019s 75 percent black population. <\/p>\n

In 1963, Moody mourned the assassination of her beloved colleague, Medgar Evers, president of the state National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and watched in horror as local whites refused to convict his murderer. Thirty years later, Byron De La Beckwith was finally convicted of homocide and imprisoned for life. Today, visitors who fly into the Mississippi state capital, land at Jackson-Evers International Airport.<\/p>\n

These shifts make \u201cComing of Age\u201d seem, to many readers, an inspiring account of survival, resistance and victory. <\/p>\n

But to others, the book is anything but a triumphalist story. Instead, its lessons are grim: In retrospect, civil rights victories seem superficial, while the brutal poverty and racism Moody described endures. <\/p>\n

Compared to whites, black people in the U.S. are more than twice as likely to die in infancy<\/a>, three times more likely to be poor<\/a>, three times more likely to be killed by police<\/a>, five times more likely to be imprisoned<\/a> and seven times more likely to be murdered<\/a>. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was gutted by a 2013 Supreme Court decision<\/a> that emboldened states around the country to create new restrictions that prevent black citizens from voting<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Anne Moody was one of the lucky ones. She graduated from college, moved north and published a best-selling memoir.<\/p>\n

But despite the accolades, television appearances, radio interviews and speaking engagements, she could never really escape Jim Crow Mississippi. It had deprived her of her family and a place to truly call home.<\/p>\n

\u201cComing of Age\u201d ends with Moody listening to civil rights workers sing the anthem, \u201cWe Shall Overcome.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI wonder,\u201d she wrote. \u201cI really wonder.\u201d <\/p>\n

Fifty years later, many of us are still wondering.\"The<\/p>\n

Leigh Ann Wheeler<\/a>, Professor of History, Binghamton University, State University of New York<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leigh Ann Wheeler, Binghamton University, State University of New York Most memoirs are soon forgotten. A rare exception is Anne Moody\u2019s \u201cComing of Age in Mississippi,\u201d which was published in 1968. It spoke to the day\u2019s pressing issues \u2013 poverty, race and civil rights \u2013 with an urgent timeliness. Fifty years later, the book still […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":13899,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[293],"tags":[4531,4229,501,500,2034,503,5226,5227,1538,3504],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13898"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13898"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13900,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13898\/revisions\/13900"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}