Coming of Age in Mississippi Study Guide

Anne Moody was born on September 15, 1940 and grew up poor in rural Mississippi. After her parents separated, Moody lived with her mother and siblings. As a child and teenager, she worked for white families in the area. As a college student, she became involved in the civil rights movement, working with such famous activists as Medgar Evers and Joan Trumpauer. She participated in a now famous sit-in at Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina to protest segregation in public spaces. In the mid-1960s, Moody moved to New York, going “underground” and refusing to do media interviews. During this time, she wrote Coming of Age in Mississippi. In 1967, Moody married Austin Strauss, a Jewish NYU graduate student. In 1971, she and Strauss had a child, Sasha Strauss. In 1972, the family moved to Berlin for two years. After returning to America in 1974, she wrote Mr. Death: Four Stories and a sequel to her autobiography, Farewell to Too Sweet, which remains unpublished. In the 1990s, Moody returned to Mississippi. She died on February 5, 2015, in the care of her sister, Adline.

The memoir recounts many important historical events that Moody witnessed first- or second-hand during her life. One of the major events that she recounts is the murder of Emmett Till in 1954. Till was brutally murdered by a group of white men in Mississippi after—they claimed—whistling at a white woman. The event cast a light on the brutality of the racism in Jim Crow-era Mississippi. Jim Crow laws, which existed from the immediate aftermath of the Civil War until the 1960s, were state- and local-level laws mandating segregation in public spaces. Though the Supreme Court upheld these laws under the idea of “separate but equal” spaces and facilities for white and Black people, in practice, the facilities of Black Americans were largely inferior to those of white Americans (as Moody touches on in the memoir) and often nonexistent. Furthermore, during her time as an activist in the South, Moody attends the 1963 March on Washington, where she hears Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream Speech.” This march, which was organized to protest unemployment, segregation, and lack of voting rights for Black Americans, had massive historical impact in pushing President John F. Kennedy to pass civil rights legislation. 

Moody’s second book, Mr. Death: Four Stories was conceived to teach young children about death. Though the forward of the book specified that the true focus of the work was the love present in the stories, the book was widely criticized for its brutal and violent depictions of its characters’ fates. On another note, Coming of Age in Mississippi also brings to mind another very famous memoir by a Black activist, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Both books describe the way the author’s upbringing and struggles against racism evolved into their practices as activists.  Additionally, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time also aims to educate the audience about the author’s experience of racism in America and examine its historical context. Finally, in Angela Davis: An Autobiography, much like Anne Moody’s memoir, a famous Black woman tells her own story of growing up in the American South and becoming involved with the civil rights movement.