Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968) Essay Example
(2) Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968)
In the beginning I never really saw myself as a writer. I was first and foremost an activist in the civil rights movement in Mississippi. When I could no longer see that anything was being accomplished by our work there, I left and went North. I came back to see through my writing that no matter how hard we in the movement worked, nothing seemed to change; that we made a few visible little gains; yet at the root, things always remained the same; and that the movement was not in control of its destiny, nor did we have any means of gaining control of it. We were like an angry dog on a leash that had turned on its master. It could bark and howl and snap, and sometimes even bite, but the master was always in control. I realized that the universal fight for human rights, dignity, justice, equality, and freedom is not and should not be just the fight of the American Negro or the Indians or the Chicanos. It's the fight of every ethnic and racial minority, every suppressed and exploited person, everyone of the millions who daily suffer one or another of the indignities of the powerless and voiceless masses. And this trend of thinking is what finally brought about my involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, especially as it began to a splinter and get more narrowly nationalistic in its thinking.
Anne Moody (born September 15 1940) is an African American author who has written about her experiences growing up poor and black in rural Mississippi, and then joining the Civil Rights Movement, which fought racism against blacks in the United States beginning in the 1950s.
Born as Essie Mae Moody, she was the eldest of nine children of Fred and Elnire Moody. After her parents split up, she grew up with her mother in Centreville, Mississippi, while her father lived in nearby Woodville, Mississippi. At a young age she began working for whites in the area, cleaning their houses and helping their children with homework for
In the beginning I never really saw myself as a writer. I was first and foremost an activist in the civil rights movement in Mississippi. When I could no longer see that anything was being accomplished by our work there, I left and went North. I came back to see through my writing that no matter how hard we in the movement worked, nothing seemed to change; that we made a few visible little gains; yet at the root, things always remained the same; and that the movement was not in control of its destiny, nor did we have any means of gaining control of it. We were like an angry dog on a leash that had turned on its master. It could bark and howl and snap, and sometimes even bite, but the master was always in control. I realized that the universal fight for human rights, dignity, justice, equality, and freedom is not and should not be just the fight of the American Negro or the Indians or the Chicanos. It's the fight of every ethnic and racial minority, every suppressed and exploited person, everyone of the millions who daily suffer one or another of the indignities of the powerless and voiceless masses. And this trend of thinking is what finally brought about my involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, especially as it began to a splinter and get more narrowly nationalistic in its thinking.
Anne Moody (born September 15 1940) is an African American author who has written about her experiences growing up poor and black in rural Mississippi, and then joining the Civil Rights Movement, which fought racism against blacks in the United States beginning in the 1950s.
Born as Essie Mae Moody, she was the eldest of nine children of Fred and Elnire Moody. After her parents split up, she grew up with her mother in Centreville, Mississippi, while her father lived in nearby Woodville, Mississippi. At a young age she began working for whites in the area, cleaning their houses and helping their children with homework for