Coming of Age in Mississippi

Brett Wittenberg
American Studies
March 25, 2009
Paper #4
Rough Draft

Coming of Age in Mississippi

Perception about historical context is formed on many levels. Scholarly articles and academic accounts help to form a framework of a past time period. Historians’ accounts, however, are not enough to fully understand what culture was truly like on a personal, or even anecdotal level. Memoir has long been a way of filling in the contextual gaps of history. Through personal accounts and overarching themes a dichotomy of information can be created and a real understanding can be reached. Anne Moody provides this type of anecdotal story telling in her memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi. Although certain elements of the civil rights movement have been well publicized, the personal stories of the individual activists and their journey to the national mall remained untold. Moody provides a perspective of racism through an innocent child’s eyes, and in doing so, creates a picture of the unthinkable inequality that was day-to-day life in this country just a half century ago. Throughout her memoir Moody created the theme of a disorganized and persecuted race struggling to find a national identity in a country that viewed them as second-class citizens.
The lack of unity Moody saw between her fellow African Americans leading up to the civil rights movement creates a motif of conflict both within African American culture and American culture as a whole. The struggle to live and work in service to the culturally superior white Americans is expressed on a personal level as Moody recreates this oppressive time. Moody, through this memoir, is attempting to further the spread of equality and justice for all men with her poignant and telling analysis of the time period leading up to the civil rights movement. Tone and imagery are used throughout to show the extent of the racially motivated thought. Racism permeated every level of society as Moody was growing up, and yet she was able to imagine a world in which everyone was equal, a world that with her help would come to pass. Moody uses tone in her explanation of the thought processes concerning race divisions. The child Moody tries desperately to understand why she is seen as less of a person just for being black. She is even further perplexed by the way in which every African American role model she would have adhered to the social stigma. Moody remembers a time in which unorganized protest would have gotten you nowhere, a time when it was dangerous to think differently than the white masses.
The relatively short historical timeframe created a situation in which the generational gap was astounding. Parents and children saw the world very differently and in some cases violent clashes resulted. Anne Moody’s generation was the last to experience racial inequality to the extent that it was prevalent at that time. Generations after Moody were guaranteed their civil rights from birth because of the accomplishments of those who came before them. Due to the drastic cultural change this country went through during those turbulent times leading up to the civil rights movement, racial opinions of African Americans changed more in a few years than they had in the centuries before. Moody uses imagery in her story telling to illustrate the way it felt to not understand racial inequality when every else took it as a given. To feel as worthy as her white peers of respect, but to never receive any. Moody and her generation of black activists bridged the gap between the way the world was and the way they thought it should be. Moody even checked the genitalia of her white classmates to try to better understand the physical differences that made the whites so superior. Moody creates the image of true confusion and how it must have felt to see your parents so willingly succumb to the racism of an overbearing American society.