Born Essie Mae Moody in 1940 to sharecroppers in Centreville, Mississippi, Anne Moody was a Civil rights activist and writer. She received a basketball scholarship to attend Natchez College but developed a sense of activism and social responsibility as a student at the historically black Tougaloo College in Mississippi. As a college student, she participated in the wave of civil disobedience that characterized the 1950s and 1960s in the U.S. In addition to helping to organize the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), she also participated in a SNCC organized sit-in at a Woolworth’s Department Store in 1963. She, along with two other students, are present in the iconic image of white retaliation as they are assaulted and covered with food. The same year, Moody attended the March on Washington at which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered “I Have a Dream.” After graduating, she worked as a civil rights coordinator for Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. She held this position for a short time before moving to the New York City where she began writing her most well-known book— Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968).
Moody’s memoir recounts Moody’s childhood in Mississippi and the socio-economic contexts that shaped the experiences and activism of African Americans in the Deep South. Following one of America’s most infamous acts of racial violence in which a fourteen-year-old boy was murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman (the woman has recently admitted that the accusation was false), Moody reflects, “Before Emmett Till’s murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me—the fear of being killed just because I was black. This was the worst of my fears. I knew once I got food, the fear of starving to death would leave. I also was told that if I were a good girl, I wouldn’t have to fear the Devil or hell. But I didn’t know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough, I thought.” Coming of Age in Mississippi not only captures her growth into a legendary activist but also offers a glimpse of the disillusionment that some activists faced as witnesses to the violence against themselves, their peers, and their leaders. Years later, Moody published Farewell to Too Sweet (1974) and Mr. Death: Four Stories (1975). Despite these subsequent publications, Moody would never again write about her experiences in the Civil Rights Movement, and she seldom talked about it. Moody passed away in 2015 in Gloster, Mississippi.
