Summary Of Anne Moody's Coming Of Age In Mississippi

Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi tells the story of a young girl growing up in the height of the civil rights era, and deciding at a young age to take action against the racial segregation and persecution of the time. The three moments that made Anne challenge segregation, and pushed her further towards the ideas of radicalism and away from the idealist “Gandhi” approach, were the burning of the Taplin’s house, her experience at her first organized sit in, and her arrest after a protest and her subsequent detention. These pivotal moments bring Anne from the belief that blacks and whites have no significant disagreements, a belief she only held briefly as a child, to her eventual belief that the only thing that will bring change is

Anne saw no reason to segregate something as simple as a restaurant, stating “We would like to be served here” (Moody 287). To her segregation was a pointless construct created simply to show that whites were superior to blacks, and therefore got preferred service, simply due to their skin color. A mob quickly formed to force Anne and her friends to give up on their cause. Once the mob realized she would not give in, things quickly turned violent. One man attacked Memphis “As he tried to protect his face, the man who’d thrown him down kept kicking him against the head. If he had worn hard soled shoes instead of sneakers, the first kick probably would have killed Memphis.” As the mob attacked Anne, Pearlena, and Memphis, the attackers did not worry about killing them, as a matter of fact some even seemed to try to do so. Anne was witnessing firsthand that whites did not care whether blacks, and their white sympathizers, lived or died. They cared only about their own societal superiority over blacks. Anne was not afraid of the violent crowd as one might expect, showing the second step of her radicalization. After seeing that whites were willing to kill blacks with impunity, she became willing to fearlessly die for her cause, the second step to her radicalization. To whites, her life was meaningless, and her status as a protester made many within this society want her dead. Anne could not abide by the rules of a society that detested her very existence, and could not stand for segregation, or any other oppressive societal system imposed and enforced by