In her memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi, civil rights activist Anne Moody highlights the intersection of racism and poverty in the United States in the mid-20th century, highlighting the ways that systemic racism has caused Black people to be economically dependent on white people. As a young child, Anne watches her parents go to work every day on Mr. Carter’s plantation. After Anne, Mama, Adline, and Junior move from the plantation and spend years bouncing from house to house, Moody reflects that “it seemed as though we were always moving. Every time it was to a house on some white man’s place.” The memoir highlights the effects of this race-based economic inequality on struggling Black families, with times becoming more stressful when money is tighter and Anne’s family being happier when there is more financial freedom. This tension comes to a head for her stepmother Emma’s family when Emma’s brother-in-law, Wilbert, threatens his wife with a gun and accidentally shoots and wounds Emma in the process. Rather than being angry with Wilbert, Emma blames the unfair system that the whites in Woodville perpetuated, “making it almost impossible for the Negro man to earn a living.” Anne is amazed by Emma’s forgiveness, and it’s only later, when she is a young adult working for Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Canton, Mississippi, that she begins to understand the government-sanctioned system of sharecropping, white farmers leasing their land to Black farmers in exchange for a share of the crop, and the ways it ensures that the Black population stays economically dependent on the white farmers and government by imposing high interest rates. So, as Anne grows up, she becomes awakened to the systemic racism of the American political system. She understands that her community is not poor by chance or due to any sort of incompetence, but due to a system designed to oppress Black citizens. In this way, Moody’s memoir underscores the deep interconnectedness of racism and poverty in the United States.
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The Intersection of Racism and Poverty Quotes in Coming of Age in Mississippi
I’m still haunted by dreams of the time we lived on Mr. Carter’s plantation. Lots of Negroes lived on his place. Like Mama and Daddy they were all farmers. We all lived in rotten two-room shacks. But ours stood out from the others because it was up on the hill with Mr. Carter’s big white house, overlooking the farms and the other shacks below.
“If Mama only had a kitchen like this of her own,” I thought, “she would cook better food for us.”
I wanted to enjoy and preserve that calm, peaceful look on [Mama’s] face, I wanted to think she would always be that happy, so I would never be unhappy again either…. All those dreams about eternal happiness I wanted for Mama, I knew deep down in my heart that it wouldn’t last.
I looked over at Miss Pearl them again and saw tears in the corner of Miss Pearl’s eyes. “She should cry,” I thought. “She shouldn’t even be in church and she doesn’t even speak to Mama and she lives right next door to her.”
She treated me just like I was one of her friends and I never thought of our color difference when I was with her, except when she paid me.
As they sang… I had chills all over my body and I was overcome by a sudden fear. The faces of the whites had written on them some strange yearning. The Negroes looked sad…. I got a feeling that there existed some kind of sympathetic relationship between the older Negroes and whites that the younger people didn’t quite get or understand.
A Negro man had a hard road to travel when looking for employment. A Negro woman, however, could always go out and earn a dollar a day because whites always needed a cook, a baby-sitter, or someone to do housecleaning.
“Just do your work like you don’t know nothing,” she said. “That boy’s a lot better off in heaven than he is here.”
When [Mrs. Burke] talked about Emmett Till there was something in her voice that sent chills and fear all over me. Before Emmett Till’s murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me—the fear of being killed just because I was black.
I was fifteen years old when I began to hate people. I hated the white men who murdered Emmett Till and I hated all the other whites who were responsible for the countless murders Mrs. Rice had told me about and those I vaguely remembered from childhood. But I also hated Negroes. I hated them for not standing up and doing something about the murders. In fact, I think I had a stronger resentment towards Negroes for letting whites kill them than towards the whites.
All the white folks in Centreville put together didn’t have as much as the Ourso family. I kept thinking of how unfair it was for any one set of people to have so much.
The dining room in Mrs. Burke’s house had come to mean many things to me. It symbolized hatred, love, and fear in many variations.
[Emma] didn’t blame Wilbert for shooting her. She placed the blame where it rightfully belonged, that is, upon the whites in Woodville and how they had set things up to make it almost impossible for the Negro men to earn a living.
After the sit-in, all I could think of was how sick Mississippi whites were. They believed so much in the segregated Southern way of life, they would kill to preserve it [….] I had always hated the whites in Mississippi. Now I knew it was impossible for me to hate sickness. The whites had a disease, an incurable disease in its final stage.
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that the federal government was directly or indirectly responsible for most of the segregation, discrimination, and poverty in the South.
I sat on the grass and listened to the speakers, to discover we had “dreamers” instead of leaders leading us. Just about every one of them stood up there dreaming. 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.
