Anne Moody comes to think of the civil rights movement's leadership as being out of touch with African Americans. She thinks they're dreamers, great at making inspiring speeches, but not so good at addressing bread-and-butter issues such as poverty, housing, and social welfare. Anne accepts that formal legal equality and voting rights are essential goals for the civil rights movement; Anne herself participates in voting drives with CORE. Yet she feels that too much weight is placed upon such goals at the expense of the dire necessities of everyday life such as food and clothing.

Lofty rhetoric is all very well, but it can't put food on the table or clothes on people's backs. Eloquent speeches and civil rights marches may gain a lot of media attention, but once the cameras have been switched off and the reporters have returned home, African Americans still have to engage in the daily struggle for existence. And it's that struggle, according to Anne, that the civil rights movement has largely neglected. The focus of its leadership remains fixed upon formal, rather than substantive equality.

While trying to get African Americans to vote in Mississippi as part of CORE in the summer of 1964, Moody realizes that the civil rights leaders of other groups are out of touch with the people they are working to organize. Leaders of other groups such as the NAACP believe that the African Americans in Madison County will become very excited about voting in an upcoming freedom election, but Moody, who has spent a lot of time with the people, knows that they are more concerned with survival. When local African Americans come to the CORE offices, their first concern is usually getting free clothing, not registering to vote. Moody realizes that the older people in particular have been raised with fear and won't push for civil rights. 

The year before, in 1963, while listening to Dr. Martin Luther King giving his famous "I Have A Dream" speech during the March on Washington, Moody is disillusioned and thinks:

I sat on the grass and listened to the speakers, to discover we had "dreamers" instead of leaders leading us. . . . Martin Luther King went on and on talking about his dream. I sat there thinking that in Canton we never had time to sleep, much less dream. (335)

She thinks that leaders such as King are out of touch with the ordinary African Americans in the south, who are so poor that they can only concentrate on survival. Moody finds the leaders of the movement too lofty and abstract for the people they are trying to lead. 

Anne Moody believed that many of the civil rights leaders of her time, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., relied on rallies and demonstrations, or nonviolent means as their only tool to fight racial inequality.  She felt that these methods were ineffective.

"Anne travels with Reverend King and his wife to the March on Washington in August 1963, the summer when Martin Luther King delivered his famous...