National Council for the Social Studies, the No-
table Children’s Book citation from the American
Library Association, and the “Living the Dream”
Award (1995).
Michael SamuelsMoody, Anne (1940– )
Like RICHARD WRIGHT in BLACK BOY (1945) and
MAYA ANGELOU in I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD
SINGS (1970), Anne Moody, who was given the
name Essie Mae at birth, chronicles, in Coming of
Age in Mississippi, her experience of growing up
black in America when segregation, maintained
through Jim Crow laws of “separate but equal”
practices sanctioned by the Supreme Court in its
Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896), was the way
of life in the American South. Published in 1968,
Moody’s autobiography is a powerful bildungsro-
man, an account of the educational process to
selfhood of a black girl born in 1940 and raised in
poverty in the rural segregated landscape of Mis-
sissippi during the postwar 1940s and 1950s. This
educational process told young Moody who she
was and the choices open to her, given the color
of her skin, or at least her sociopolitical identity
as the daughter of Mississippi sharecroppers, Fred
and Elmira Moody. This extraordinary, candid,
honest, riveting, and at times heart-wrenching
personal account ends in 1964 with an account of
her involvement in the CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT.
Moody begins her personal narrative with the
domestic issues her parents encountered when she
was four years old. Like many southern black males
of his generation, her father experienced great dif-
ficulty providing for the family. Fred Moody left
his wife and three children when economic dif-
ficulties exacerbated by gambling and an extra-
marital affair strained his domestic relationship.
Moody’s mother sought employment in domes-
tic service and restaurant work while the family
struggled and was frequently forced to move. At
one point, the family briefly lived in a white resi-
dential area in a small house on the property of
her mother’s employer. Although Moody and her
brother Junior frequently played with neighbor-
hood white children, she became aware of the
material advantages their white playmates enjoyed
and wished her mother could provide her children
with a bicycle or a pair of skates.
One of the first turning points in her life took
place when Moody and her family arrived at the
local movie theater at the same time as her white
playmates. Naively, the Moody siblings joined
their playmates in the “white-only” lobby before
their mother became aware of the infraction they
had committed. Immediately, to protect them and
teach them a vital lesson about the world they
lived in and the expected behavior, their mother
quickly admonished them, telling them they had
to go to the side door entrance that led to the col-
ored-only balcony. The incident opened Moody’s
eyes and confirmed what she had begun to sur-
mise: Whites enjoyed advantages over blacks sim-
ply because they were white. This, Moody learned,
was even true for her two maternal uncles who, to
her, looked as white as her playmates but were not
white according to her mother, who refused to ex-
plain why. Moody knew one thing: Racial segrega-
tion was more than skin deep.
By the time she was in the fourth grade, Moody
had to begin working, given the family’s financial
needs. Working as a domestic in the homes of sev-
eral white families, Moody, over an extended pe-
riod, observed the differences between her white
employers who either looked at her with contempt
or, impressed with her intelligence, encouraged
her to do well in school. In school, Moody worked
hard to achieve academic success; she received
outstanding grades at both the elementary and
secondary levels. Assertive and competitive, she
also was a good athlete and would go on to win an
athletic scholarship to Natchez Junior College after
graduating from high school.
In 1955, the newly renamed Anne Moody (Essie
May was replaced by Anne May on a replacement
birth certificate after a fire destroyed their fam-
ily home) experienced yet another major turn-
ing point, as this was also the infamous year that
14-year-old Emmett Till, a Chicago resident who
was spending the summer with relatives in Missis-364 Moody, Anne