Bread givers

A Book Review of Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi. Anne Moody’s autobiographical book, Coming Of Age In Mississippi, is more than just a childhood memoir by the author. Because it is played against the all too real background of racial tension in Mississippi of the segregation era, it is also a chronicle of the Civil Rights struggle and racial politics of that time.
The early part of her book relates Moody’s experiences as a girl in the rural small town of Centreville, Mississippi. Not only is there racial tension between the black Moody and the whites, there is also problems with her lighter colored black relatives. This was an interesting aspect of her book for it shows that racism was not only prevalent among the Mississippi whites but even an element of it among some blacks who because of their lighter skins considered themselves to have a higher station in life than the darker blacks. Moody showed an example of this in her book when she wrote about her mother marrying a light-skinned black man named Raymond. Raymond’s mother, Miss Pearl, treated Moody’s family rather coldly because they were not as light as she was.
It was with the whites of Centreville, however, where the greatest racial tensions were experie

Much more serious, however, was the cloud of tension that fell over Centreville in 1955 when they received news of the death of Emmett Till in another Mississippi town.

Despite the extreme protestations of her mother, who feared for Moody’s safety, she became deeply involved in the Civil Rights movement by joining the NAACP. Moody’s courage was shown by an impromptu sit-in she initiated at a bus station. A short time later, Moody took part in a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter where violence broke out.

Emmett Till was fourteen years old. He was black and lived in Chicago. In August 1955, his mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, agreed to let Emmett, her only child, visit his uncle Mose Wright in the Mississippi Delta. She did so with a reluctance based on the harsh reality of Jim Crow segregation. She instructed Emmett to be submissive to white people in Mississippi. He thought that the "silliest thing he'd ever heard." The stage was set for a clash of two worlds.

Then Moody ended the book by commenting: “I wonder. I really wonder.” Although it seemed at the time that Civil Rights legislation was far off in the future, it was only a short time later that public facilities were officially desegregated and the Voting Rights Act was passed.

At two o'clock in the morning of August 28, 1955, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam abducted Emmett Till from Mose Wright's cabin. Till's body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River three days later. It was beaten and mutilated almost beyond recognition. Emmett's silver ring with the initials "L.T." (his father's initials) was found on the body, and with this evidence Mose Wright identified the body as his nephew's.