Coming of Age in Mississippi - Essay Example

?Tim Downing-Beaver History 1302 March 28, Coming of Age in Mississippi This book written by Anne Moody is about her growing up during the sometimes turbulent and disturbing times of the civil rights movement in America. Moody is African-American and this book reflects the racism and hatred that existed in America at that time, especially in the Deep South. The experiences Moody reports are sometimes inspiring but most of the time what is most interesting about this book is that it does not sugar-coat the truth of what it was like at the time. She represents herself as being depressed and terrified, and so stressed out at one point that she has to quit the movement for a while because she cannot take it anymore. Because of its stark telling of events, and its refusal to shy away from the darker moments of American history, the book Coming of Age in Mississippi should be required reading for anybody who wants to really understand what it was like for America to arrive at a time when people are more or less treated equally. The book is organized into four different sections, each one of which tells about a different time in Moody's life. There is one for her childhood, one for high school, one for when she was in college, and the last section is about her time in the civil rights movement trying to get the vote and other rights for African-Americans. Moody's childhood was not exactly happy, as her mother was poor and her abusive father left them. She had to work from an early age after school just so her family could afford food. In high school, things do not get much better as one of the boys she knows is killed by the Klu Klux Klan and she has to continue working, often for white people who do not treat her much better than they would treat a slave. Because of all this harsh treatment in her youth, Moody shows that she started to get way too interested in things like the KKK and lynchings and racial inequality. Many of her friends and family did not like this in her and that made things even more stressful. Moody was able to get a scholarship to play basketball in college and so is able to get a good higher education. It is during her college years that she decides to join the NAACP, which only makes her relationship with her family worse. This is because she and her family all start to receive threats from the various white people they know. The last part of the book is kind of redeeming and depressing at the same time. Moody joins the civil rights movement and goes to rural parts of the south to try and convince African-Americans to register to vote so they can get treated equally. Interestingly even here Moody is seen as sometimes too serious, and she does not necessarily get along all the time with the other people in the movement. The end of the book is the most depressing part. Moody is on a bus going to Washington with a bunch of other activists and while they sing about how they shall eventually overcome oppression, she does not join in. She thinks of the violence and hatred in the south, and wonders if it will ever be over and if the movement will ever really have succeeded at what it set out to do by trying to get equality. The book Coming of Age in Mississippi, despite its depressing ending and much of the distressing events in it, really moved me as a person. I think of all the violence that African-Americans had to endure here in America, and it makes me mad. It’s especially disturbing to me since I am from middle-class white Texas and have also lived in Mississippi. While I would like to think my neighbors would not be the same as the people in the book if they had lived in the time period Moody writes about it is impossible to know for sure. I’m sure that some African-Americans who live in the south today are still treated unequally, although I hope not to the same degree as in the book. Although I do think the book does a good job of showing the darker side of events, I feel like there is not really very much about the good things. I think it would have been interesting if Moody had written another chapter showing how things have changed after equality was really achieved. It might help the reader feel some sense of relief to know whether or not things had gotten better in say another five years when racism was maybe not so bad. Then again, if racism had not gone away much in rural Mississippi in that time, it might only make things worse. I don't think Moody added a chapter like this because it was not the point of the story, really. She did not want to suggest that the civil rights movement was a good thing because that would ignore the fact that if there has to be a civil rights movement at all something in society is seriously messed up. I think this is probably why the book ends on such a depressing note on the bus. Other than this not very much was left out. I felt like I really got to know some of the characters in the book, and even though there was no outspoken heroism like the story everybody knows about Rosa Parks on the bus, the actions of most of the characters seemed more realistic and not really any less heroic. To be faced with that kind of violence and still keep on living must have been really hard. Despite this, the people Moody knew and wrote about not only kept on living but actively tried to change their lives and the lives of people around them. They did this even in the face of death threats and other despicable things from the white people of the time, who would have benefited more by keeping them underfoot instead of treating them like decent human beings. I actually learned quite a lot about America in this time period from the book. In most American History courses, there seems to be a tendency to kind of smooth over some of the rougher aspects of the country’s past. Although I obviously did know that African-Americans were not always treated with equality and fairness, and I was aware of the KKK and the racial hatred that is probably still around in some parts of the country, seeing the reality of it was still like a dash of cold water. Now when I think about the civil rights movement I will not think of Martin Luther King, Jr. first, or about President Kennedy, two men who are usually associated with the time and the push for equal rights. Instead I will think about the people they were speaking for and acting for. I will think about the African-Americans who were brutally murdered or viciously beaten down by white people in the south. The thought of this makes me feel a little like I will be sick, and I think this is what Moody was partly trying to do with her book. She was trying to show the horror and sickness of racism at its most ugly, but at the same time she was just telling about what had happened to her in her life. The fact that the book does not just say racism and its problems are wrong is part of what makes it hard to put down. Instead it lets the reader figure these things out for themselves based on what happens to the people Moody is talking about in the book. I would definitely recommend Coming of Age in Mississippi to anyone who is interested in American History. In fact, I would even recommend it to people who are not interested in it. A lot of people today take things like democracy and equality for granted, as though it is something that really is just a natural occurrence. I think reading this book would help break that notion of them, and there would be more understanding between people of different racial backgrounds if that were the case. Sometimes, for instance, I hear people complain about equal opportunity laws and say that they give non-whites a better chance at a job, and that this is unfair. I think that after reading a book like Moody’s they would change their opinion for sure. If nothing else reading it would be good for them since they would probably have been exposed to a different point of view about the world. Growing Up in Mississippi related to many of the themes we have discussed in History 1302 so far. The themes it showed off the most usefully were the discussions in chapters 19, 20, and 21. Each of these chapters has a section which talks about what defines American-ness, or who should be included in such a definition. Moody's stark descriptions of the Deep South through the time periods those chapters talk about made it much clearer exactly what was at stake for the people involved. It is not just an abstract idea of freedom and equality that was at the heart of the civil rights movement, as some might claim. Instead Moody shows her readers that this abstract idea was backed up by a demand for solid action and real change for everyday people. Each of these things alone is not enough, as can be seen by the way African-Americans continued to get treated despite laws saying they were the same. These issues made the book a very useful one to read for this class. It shows the reality of many of the things that the textbook only talks about in general terms. Furthermore, it definitely makes the struggle of Americans of all sorts to be truly free something that is very modern. By reading the story of Moody’s upbringing and her own struggles with her family, her community, and the whole of American society, I feel that I now have a much better understanding of what the personal stakes must have been like for other oppressed people in the United States throughout its history. I think it will also help make me more aware of how these issues are still being dealt with today, for instance in how some people think everybody who is a Muslim is an evil person, or violent. Reading Moody’s book is an eye-opening experience. Works Cited Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi. New York: Laurel, 1968. Print. Read More