The Fight For What’s Right

Anne Moody’s memoir, ‘Coming of Age in Mississippi’ recounts the author’s experiences of growing up in the South during the age of racial segregation. From childhood through college Moody found herself in lots of situations and events that were presented to a black child growing up in the South during this time period. Instead of accepting the murals of society during this time period, Moody was able to use these different encounters to understand the concept of racism and the confines it set on citizen relations in Mississippi during the age of racial segregation. After college, Moody becomes a part of the Civil Rights movement, when she decides to join several socially unsatisfied citizens in the process of inequality. Moody was the kind of person that always, starting at a young age thought differently than the average southerner during segregation. She wondered why whites were able to live in big white homes while their children skated, rode bikes and played on expensive playhouses.
In the book, Moody explains when she first became aware of the murals and confines that had been established in Mississippi during the age of racial segregation. After becoming good friends with the white children who played in front of her house, she was quickly about to find out first hand that the attitude and mindset installed into the citizens in Mississippi residents wouldn’t allow them to accept this kind of relationship among black and whites.
Moody elaborates on a childhood experience in which her and her family were walking in the movies and saw Katie and Bill (children of the whites that owned the furniture store), along with their parents. Happy and excited to see one another they ran to greet eachother. Then proceeding to sit with one another when suddenly Moody’s mother rushes in and snatches her from the seat. Moody said that ‘…when we got outside, we stood there crying, and we could hear the white children crying inside the white lobby.’(33) This incident showed children unaware of the custom of segregation. It was the adults that enforced the custom of segregation that the children had not understood yet. Moody continues to say that ‘I had never really thought of them as white before. Now all of a sudden they were white, and their whiteness made them better than me. I now realized that not only were they better than me because they were white, but everything they owned and everything connected with them were better than what was available.’(34) Now she had, from this incident realized that the color of a person’s skin during this time period was a major factor in why she wasn’t able to enjoy the same luxuries as white children growing up in the South fighting the restrictions and customs of society.