Anne Moody was an activist during the civil rights movement. Moody is not found in many accounts of the civil rights era, but her work is recorded in her autobiography Coming of Age in Mississippi. Moody was born in Centreville, Mississippi in 1940 and grew up during the time of Jim Crow. She reports several experiences that made her believe she should fight against Southern racism. One of the primary reasons was the lynching of Emmett Till, which she remembers vividly. Till, who was killed when Moody was 14, became a rallying cry for many in the African American community after being tied to a cotton gin and killed for speaking to a white woman.
Anne Moody escaped her impoverished upbringing to go to Tougaloo College, where she became involved in first the NAACP and then CORE, the Congress On Racial Equality. Moody’s work started with basic actions, such as attending meetings and trying to convince others to vote, but she soon decided to work in the civil rights movement full-time.
Moody lived in a civil rights house. During the 1960s, civil rights workers lived in various houses in rural Mississippi and worked to register voters and try to make inroads against racism. In Coming of Age in Mississippi, Moody records her experiences with CORE and relates her life to major civil rights events, such as the Birmingham church bombing.
After a year of full-time civil rights work, Moody left Mississippi to live with her sister in New Orleans. She wrote Coming of Age in Mississippi soon after her departure from the civil rights movement. Moody then moved to New York and has remained largely absent since that time.
Anne Moody’s memoir is a commonly used text in college courses on civil rights and black women’s history. Moody’s book describes in detail how it felt to be involved with civil rights work. She includes stories about her relationship with her family and how her civil rights work ruined her relationship with her mother. She also discusses the fear she felt in exquisite detail.
Few know what happened to Moody after she left the civil rights movement. Rumors exist suggesting Moody was briefly involved with some community breakfast programs in New York, though there is no definitive answer as to where her life headed after the 1970s. Still Moody’s work remains one of the best stories of the civil rights era.
