Introduction
By the late 1960s, the civil rights movement had seen huge successes but with tragic consequences. Essential anti-discrimination legislation had been bypassed, but in the regard of lots of civil rights campaigners, society had not modified enough. The civil rights movement itself was modifying, turning away from the diplomacy of Martin Luther King to a more confrontational stance characterized by Malcolm X. Into this bewilderment, in 1968, Moody issued her autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi.
This surprising depiction of what it was like to grow up a poor, southern African American imprisoned the attention of Americans around the state from all social strata and all backdrops. Moody, intimately entailed in the civil rights movement in the first half of the 1960s, created a memorable image of the inequities and aggression that featured southern community.
Containment ideology
Instead of concentrating on her years in the civil rights movement, Moody selected to start at the beginning – when she was four, the child of poor sharecroppers working for a white farmer. In narrating the chronicle of her life, Moody reveals why the civil rights movement was such a requirement and the depth of the unfairness it had to change; Moody’s story reveals the uphill battle that featured all southern African Americans.
More than thirty years later, Moody’s autobiography still preserves the power it had for its readers. Part of the book’s continuing appeal is its basic humankind. Despite herself, Moody gets drawn into the struggle for civil rights, regarding the challenge is extremely difficult but knowing she has no other way to take.
Coming of Age in Mississippi in Relation to women due to its first hand account Coming of Age in Mississippi proffers many insights into the behavior of black women during the 1950s and 1960s. It also offers good insight into the involvement of black women in the Civil Rights Movement. Moody remembers lots of stories of her family as she grew up and the complexities they challenged. The adversities against the women in her life who were attempting to endure in a sexist and racist environment are common.
She also offers good data on the role of women during the Civil Rights Movement. There are narrations where she is working along key participants of the movement. She tells her skills of having to work next to men at rallies and complaints and meetings, but still possessing to do secretarial work, cook and clean. She also argued on her aggravations with being a woman in the movement and possessing to deal with steady protection and suppression.
One of the most significant themes of Coming of Age in Mississippi is the unhelpful power of intolerance. There is the discrimination of whites against blacks, and also the chauvinism of lighter-skinned blacks toward darker-skinned blacks, and of citizens with money against poorer. Anne undergoes each kind of discrimination, which results in her great pain. In fact, being the casualty of prejudice tends to discriminate Anne herself against whites and lighter-skinned blacks.
Her discrimination is demonstrated by the fact that she almost declines to attend Tougaloo College, the place where she links the civil rights movement, as she is afraid that it has too many light-skinned black undergraduates. She also disbelieves her professors as they are white, and the Reverend Edward King, who is, worse yet, a southern white. Lastly, after meeting lighter-skinned blacks and whites who do not look down on her, Anne recognizes that not all members of these groups are unreliable. Nevertheless, prejudice nearly costs her significant capabilities in her life, and makes her a doubtful and distrustful person.
Reference
Moody, Anne. Coming of age in Mississippi. Dell publishers, 1992.