Coming of Age in Mississippi

A detailed Summary of Coming of Age in Mississippi

Coming of Age in Mississippi is an autobiography written by an African-American woman exploring the social significance of race in Mississippi and the deep South and the impact it had on her life and her perspective. The author depicts her life story, both her experiences and evolving thinking on race, gender, and social relations to demonstrate the origin, evolution, and social and political consequences of the civil rights movement. She traces her life through what she labels as her four stages of development: her childhood, high school years, college and the civil rights movement. The story describes in detail some of the consequences of being black in Mississippi.

The author begins with her childhood and the way her mother struggled to care for her and 7 other children after her father left. She recalls the poor living conditions and the lack of food her family suffered in. She was the oldest child of poor sharecroppers. She recognized early that the only option available to her mother, who was uneducated, was working as a domestic help for meaningless pay. She even worked herself, taking on the burden of helping to support her family while she was in school. Although she lacked the inte

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rs were powerless to do anything to stop this at the time. It would still be years before the social conscious toward race would shift.

This book has been recognized as a very realistic portrayal of life in the South for blacks in the 1950's and 1960's. Civil rights activists were fighting for one of many civil rights that had long been denied to blacks in this country, rights that I, as a "minority" can enjoy today. Social customs that separated the races in every aspect of daily life were put into laws, from segregated movie theaters, lunch counters and schools. It was the Southern atmosphere of legal oppression that led to commonplace white violence against blacks. Mississippi whites believed so much in the segregated way of life in the south, they would kill to preserve it.

In her senior year in college, Moody was involved in her first sit-in, when she went to the white section of the local bus station and refused to leave. After that, the head of the NAACP activities at her college asked her, to be the spokesman for a team that would sit in at a Woolworth's lunch counter, which was segregated at the time. She knew she would go to jail for this but she did it anyway. A white mob formed around her and her friends and threw things at them and smeared food on them. Later, Moody joined CORE and continued to fight for voting rights until she ended up on the KKK black list until she fled the south to testify in Washington.

I found this book to be an excellent view through which to examine a variety of issues in recent US History. She used the voice of a writer to tell a story of the history. I had read about various aspects of the civil rights movement, but to read it in reference to someone's real life who experienced it was completed different. I admired Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a leader and often never really understood t

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Approximate Word count = 1305
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Novels