As we move into the final week of Black History Month and African-Americans cheer the victory of “Glory” at the recent Academy Awards ceremony after many have commemorated the life and legacy of Malcolm X, we pause now for a moment of silence in memory of Anne Moody, who died Feb. 5. She is best remembered for her gripping memoir “Coming of Age in Mississippi,” which vividly captured the terrible Apartheid-like days of her youth. She was 74.
Before itemizing her life and listing the moments of her stay with us, here’s an excerpt from her book, which was published in 1968 by Doubleday. After discussing several incidents in which the SNCC offices had been bombed, Moody, undaunted, wrote, “That summer [1964], I could feel myself beginning to change. For the first time, I began to think something would be done about whites killing, beating and misusing Negroes. I knew I was going to be a part of whatever happened.”
Moody kept that promise, and a picture of her captures her defiance. She is sitting in a five and dime store with a rabid white mob surrounding her and two other protesters. The mob is seen pouring ketchup and other condiments on them. This action was part of the growing number of demonstrations inside the segregated lunch counters across the South in the early 1960s.
“A man rushed forward, threw Memphis [one of the protesters] from his seat and slapped my face,” she wrote of that incident. “Then another man who worked in the store threw me against an adjoining counter.” Her commitment was being brutally tested. The sit-in lasted until the store closed.
Two weeks after that sit-in, Medgar Evers, who headed the state chapter of the NAACP, was gunned down in the driveway of his home by members of the Klan.
Each day brought a renewed wave of racism and violence, and after she traveled to New York City to share this experience, she decided it was time for her to take a break and help the struggle from afar. Plus, she wanted to test her mettle as a writer.
Moody was born Sept. 14, 1940, near Centerville, Miss. She was the daughter of poor sharecroppers and educated in a segregated Jim Crow system, which she transcended thanks to a basketball scholarship to attend a junior college in Natchez.
Later, she transferred to Tougaloo College, from which she graduated in 1964. It was during this period that she began her association with activists in the Civil Rights Movement.
The turbulence in Mississippi, especially during the “Freedom Summer,” was very troubling for her, and she was invited to New York on a speaking tour. Eventually, she found work at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., but that was a brief stint. It was at this time she began to focus on writing her memoir.
“Coming of Age in Mississippi” received great reviews and forecasted a promising writing career. However, she put so much into this first book, there was apparently only a bit of inspiration left. “Mr. Death: Four Stories” (1975) was her only other book.
She and her sister Adline lived for many years outside of Mississippi until they returned to settle in Gloster in the mid-1990s, where she died after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
Somehow, the trauma of Mississippi was never really overcome, her sister suggested. “She was to the point of being paranoid that somebody was always after her,” she told a reporter. “When she would go anywhere, it was always with her son. Someone was always with her.”
It was perhaps that paranoia that kept her from attending a ceremony two years ago commemorating the 50th anniversary of the sit-in at Woolworth’s.
Along with Adline, Moody is survived by her son Sascha Straus; sisters Virginia Gibson, Frances Jefferson and Vallery Jefferson; and brothers Ralph Jefferson, James Jefferson and Kenneth Jefferson.