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Why did Anne Moody begin "Coming of Age in Mississippi" outlining black life on a white-owned plantation?
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Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi has been praised as a classic of African American literature. It is frequently assigned reading material in high schools and universities across the U.S., and it has won numerous prestigious literary awards. The book has also been made into two major motion pictures, including a documentary film directed by David Sutherland, titled Anne Moody: Coming of Age in Mississippi . The film was released on DVD in January 2017.
What she's doing here is setting the scene for what's about to follow. By giving us an immediate insight into her background, Anne Moody's giving us a much better idea of what motivated her to get involved in the civil rights movement. Growing up as an African American on a Southern white plantation, Anne quickly discovered that she occupied the very lowest rung in society. Denied all basic rights, she and her family were treated like second-class citizens, kept down by a system of institutional repression.
By providing us with a backstory, Anne is demonstrating that the issue of civil rights isn't abstract; it's deeply personal. And that the denial of those rights affects the lives of real people on a daily basis. Most people reading Coming of Age in Mississippi would doubtless have been sympathetic to the civil rights cause to begin with, but by introducing a personal...
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element into the story straight away, Anne Moody's hoping to make an even deeper connection with the reader, making subsequent events in her memoirs seem like a natural outgrowth of her formative experiences.
Anne Moody was very active in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. She worked not only with the NAACP but also with CORE, the Congress of Racial Equity. In 1964, she became the civil rights project coordinator for Cornell University.
When she began writing her memoirs, rather than focus on her efforts to gain equality for African Americans, she chose to show what life was like for a poor black child. Moody's parents were sharecroppers in Mississippi. Life was hard, and it was filled with injustices for African Americans. By allowing readers into her own childhood experiences, Moody made the civil rights movement more than a political cause; she made it a personal issue for anyone who read her book.
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Why did Anne Moody write Coming of Age in Mississippi?
Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi is an autobiography of the author’s childhood and youth that emphasizes her growing involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. Moody’s reasons for writing the book include showing how a person can persevere and succeed despite even severe hardships, including racism and extreme poverty, through individual and collective efforts. She offers her own story as an example of how African Americans of her generation struggled to effect positive change in the 1940s through 1960s.
Along with her participation in efforts for desegregation of schools and other public institutions, her activism addressed voting rights and advocacy for the passage of legislation that would guarantee universal protection of civil rights. She also explores the development of different perspectives within the Civil Rights Movement, including her reasons for often diverging from the goals and strategies that the movement’s leadership advocated. Moody also aims to show the varying role of faith and doubt in motivating her political commitment.