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Example research essay topic: Civil Rights Movement Coming Of Age In Mississippi - 1,837 words

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Anne Moody s Story: Coming of Age in Mississippi by K. Bernardo, for The Paper Store, Inc. Nov. 1998 Many stories have been written of loving families who, despite being desperately poor and despised by society at large, create a close and nurturing home life out of nothing more than love. Anne Moody s story is not one of these. As Erica Bauermeister writes, Blunt, powerful, and angry, Coming of Age in Mississippi dares the reader to find anything poetic in the lives of black people living in rural Mississippi in the 1940 s and 50 s (Bauermeister, amazon.

com). Rather, Moody s story tells of a childhood in such appalling conditions that it is astonishing that she grew up to be the person she did, for she could easily have been worn down by the burden of her circumstances. Her father, a compulsive gambler and womanizer, left her mother alone with three small children when Anne (then called Essie Mae) was four. Their home was so poor the walls were papered with newspaper. Her mother had to leave her extremely small children home alone because she had to work and there was no one to care for them; at one point Anne s mother only earned between five dollars a week, with which she had to feed her two children, and consequently, the children got only leftovers from her job or beans and bread. Erica Bauermeister notes that when Anne was nine years old, she herself began cleaning houses to help her family eat (Bauermeister, amazon.

com). As Moody shows, grinding poverty such as she and her family experienced has undermined the self-image and the self-respect of many of her people. Once people have sunk to this state, it is extremely difficult to bring them out of this way of thinking, especially in cases where this has been a trait culturally imposed and reinforced over the period of multiple generations. This was the case with the blacks in the South; the black people simply became resigned to the limits set on their own self-realization, and thus actually came to participate in the taboos and rules of the racist system that oppressed them. As Joy James observes, Moody describes her father s depression from his inability to provide for the family and his emotional violence inside the family (James, 135). It is no accident that Moody s father abandoned his very young family in search of a life of fewer responsibilities; although he would have been able to articulate the problem, he undoubtedly subconsciously felt he had no reason to continue working to support a system that had been set up to do nothing but oppress him, so he exchanged the hardships of family life for an easier life without these attachments.

Clearly, divorced from a sense of self-esteem and personal empowerment, sex, gambling, and drinking were the only available substitutes to make men in Mr. Moody s position feel like men. It is not only mistresses who take the edge off the impoverished and frustrated black male s misplaced need to prove himself; Moody notes that her stepfather sexually harassed her, which was the motivating factor in her decision to leave home. Moody also notes that oppressed black people tended to vent their frustrations on one another rather than on the untouchable whites. She observes that her mother, crying incessantly because she was pregnant with her seventh child and her latest husband was out of work, almost drove us all crazy. Every evening I came home from work, she was beating on the children making them cry too (Moody, 113).

Moody mentions this frustration al type of beating fairly frequently, observing that Some Negroes would come to town on Saturday night just to pick a fight with another Negro. Once the fight was over, they were satisfied. They beat their frustrations and discontent out on each other (Moody, 261). As Anne grew older, she learned she would have to fight a demon bigger than poverty racism.

Racism, of course, was the cause of her family s poverty to begin with, but up until Anne s early adolescence she had only had cause to deal with the symptoms, not with the disease. Obviously she was used to segregation; schools were segregated, as were most public places such as restaurants, and the black sections were never as nice as the white. However, her most telling experience was her encounter with Mrs. Burke, whose home she cleaned. Mrs.

Burke always made her come in the back door, which Anne accepted; however, it was through Mrs. Burke that she learned of a black boy who had been killed (and deservedly so, in Mrs. Burke s opinion) just for speaking disrespectfully to a white girl. As Gabrielle Martino notes, [Moody] dates the dark dawning of her racial politicization to when she was 14 years old and heard of the death of another 14 year old Emmett Till. His death left her profoundly shaken, and from that moment forward she was dedicated to fighting the injustices she saw everywhere she looked, sometimes at great risk to her personal safety Martino, emmettreadlist. html).

One s color, Anne realized, not only forced one to come in through the back doors of life; it could be fatal as well. Moody was a very independent young woman who had a very difficult time conceiving of herself as being anything other than a person of potential. In high school, Anne s solution was to bury herself in her books whenever she was not working, hoping that her valedictorian grades would enable her to break out of the cycle of poverty. Somehow, her cracks of spare time were filled with all sorts of other activities, including teaching Sunday school and tutoring other black students.

She was even voted homecoming queen. After high school she went to Natchez Junior College, and then Tougaloo College, and it was at Tougaloo that she became active in black civil rights activities. There, at last, she found the solution she had been seeking for so long. She became involved with groups such as the NAACP, CORE, and SNCC all bastions of the civil rights movement and social change in the sixties.

It is obvious that Anne was not one to sit back and accept the caste system that had been thrust on her; it did not fit her self-concept and she recognized that participation in the racist caste system precluded forward movement and perpetuated the cycle of poverty of her childhood. Barbara Green notes that Anne s refusal to kowtow to the system caused difficulties between Anne and her mother, noting that Moody s book features signs of the emergence of strained relationships between mothers and daughters when daughters expressed their blackness in a manner that countered their mothers pattern of response, resulting in hurt and conflict (Green, 139) Nonetheless, Moody opted to participate in organizations, and in a larger socio-political movement, that could change the system that had dragged her mother down. She would no longer be a victim; she was a survivor, and more than that a warrior. Moody demonstrates through her book that economic privation and racial discrimination can work two ways; it can either launch a self-determined person out of the cycle, or serve as a significant motivator for reinforcing the status quo.

If the oppressed people believe that by remaining in the oppressed situation they will continue to physically survive and by moving outside of it they are risking their lives or their livelihood, which amount to the same thing they are often willing to sacrifice their self-esteem to stay in the demeaning situation. They try to convince themselves that they can continue to act deferentially in the presence of whites and scorn them behind their backs, but the hypocrisy of this position further undermines their self-concept and contributes to feelings of both shame and anger. Eventually such people grow to accept the ignobility of their situation as being an essential aspect of their character, and then it becomes much more difficult for them to lift themselves out of their oppressed state. Moody was very fortunate to be different a woman who was constitutionally unable to sacrifice her essential individuality to a system that oppressed all those around her. Through her activities with in the civil rights movement, and through the publication of her book, Moody hoped to muster the forces necessary to start a movement. Her intent was to raise the consciousness of the rank and file to make them realize how insidiously and yet completely they have been oppressed and what they d need to do about it.

As the book closes, however, we find that she is becoming increasingly disillusioned and increasingly angry about the long term prognosis of the civil rights movement. We should probably not be surprised; Moody is a woman of both strong opinions and extraordinarily large vision, and few people could have matched her passion. So much was accomplished in such a short time during the pivotal period when she was active with CORE and its parallel organizations, that it would have naturally been frustrating to Moody to have this momentum slow down. In Coming of Age in Mississippi, however, Anne Moody has created a work of incredible power and poignancy. It is not only a condemnation of racism, it is a testimony to the work that an ordinary person an exceptionally strong-willed and determined person, but an ordinary person nonetheless can do to make a difference in the world around them. The Wyoming Council for the Humanities Web Site observes that Moody's autobiography is a landmark work in what has been called the new literature of obscurity of the late 1960 s.

Like Maya Angelous I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Claude Browns Man child in the Promised Land, it reminds us that the spotlight of truth can rest unforgettably on the ordinary life (Ordinary Lives, lives. htm). Moody s book tells the story of her ordinary life, and the lives of the ordinary people around her. And yet when we consider that prior to the pivotal years of the Civil Rights movement in the early 1960 s, black people could not enter a white restaurant, or Laundromat, or school, or even a bus; they could not live in white neighborhoods, or, in many areas, not even exercise their right to vote without fear then we realize what miracles these ordinary people wrought.

Works Cited: Bauermeister, Erica. Coming of Age in Mississippi (Book Reviews). http: web Green, Barbara L. , Black Womens Blues: A Literary Anthology, 1934 - 1988. (Book Reviews). (1995) Vol. 20, MELUS, March 1, pp 139 (3). James, Joy.

Gender, Race, and Radicalism. (1994). Vol. 8, Contemporary Women s Issues Database, Sept. 1, pp. 135 - 39. Ordinary Lives (Book Discussion). Wyoming Council for the Humanities Web Site. web Martino, Gabrielle.

The Murder of Emmett Till web sounder / more info /emmettreadlist. html Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi. (New York, NY: Dell) 1968.


Free research essays on topics related to: anne moody, black people, ordinary person, civil rights movement, coming of age in mississippi

Research essay sample on Civil Rights Movement Coming Of Age In Mississippi

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