Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody (my memoir example)

 

Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Dell Publishing, 1968) is Anne Moody’s memorable and moving 384-paged memoir recalling her childhood and young adult life. Moody’s memoir is split into four sections, “Childhood,” “High School,” “College,” and “The Movement,” spanning from the age of four, when Moody lived with her mother and siblings on a rural Mississippi plantation in the 1940s, to her mid-twenties, when Moody was a politically active college graduate who participated in various Civil Rights organizations and activities in Mississippi in the 1960s. However, Moody not only traces her personal story in her memoir, but provides readers with a “slice of life” narrative about what it was like to grow up poor, African American, and female in rural Mississippi in the mid-twentieth century. The Deep South, and Mississippi in particular, was a racist society where whites of every socio-economic class and gender reigned supreme in every way. African Americans were rendered powerless, and as Moody demonstrates in her frank and accurate narrative, it was a society where whites would do anything – from giving low pay and unequal status to African Americans to racially intimidating African Americans through sexual abuse and lynching – to keep things that way.

Coming of Age in Mississippi is a book that must be read, particularly by teens and adults. It is a great primary source for teachers to use in high school and college-level U.S. History courses to help students gain a better understanding of mid-twentieth century America. It not only covers African American history and the Civil Rights movement, but aspects of region (southern history), gender (women and family life), and class (working-class and poor Americans, poverty). America in the mid-twentieth century is often taught with a middle-class white male emphasis, meaning that there is a larger focus on war (World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War), Communists, the nuclear family, and fear of nuclear war than on other topics from the period, like the Civil Rights movement. And when it comes time to teach the Civil Rights movement, the focus is usually on the men involved. But that provides only a partial picture. This is why students need to read sources like Coming of Age in Mississippi that tell the history of America in the mid-twentieth century from different and multiple perspectives (in this case, African American, female, and poor), because by doing so they will gain a more complete, more truthful picture of what America was like in this period.  

Finally, there is a valuable social justice message in Coming of Age in Mississippi that is an important takeaway for every reader. Readers of this memoir need to keep in mind long after reading this book that there is always a need for brave people who are willing to question and challenge the way things are in the present in order to make a better future, as Anne Moody did.  

 --Ashley Cleeves