Anne Moody (September 15, 1940 – February 5, 2015) was an American author who wrote about her experiences growing up poor and black in rural Mississippi, and her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement through the NAACP, CORE and SNCC. Moody began fighting racism and segregation as a young girl growing up in Centreville, Mississippi.
Life
Moody, born Essie Mae Moody on September 15, 1940, was the oldest of eight children. After her parents split up when she was five or six years old, on a basketball scholarship. The mob continuously poured flour, salt, sugar, and mustard on them, as depicted in a Jackson Daily News photograph. Two weeks after the sit-in, Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers was assassinated outside his family home in Jackson. Anne Moody was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi for attempting to protest inside of a post office with 13 others, including Joan Trumpauer, Doris Erskine, Jeanette King, and Lois Chaffee. all of which remain unpublished. Moody was also involved in the anti-nuclear movement. She resettled in Mississippi in the early 1990s, under the care of her younger sister Adline Moody. Moody suffered from dementia in her later years.
Autobiography
Moody's autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), was acclaimed by Senator Edward Kennedy for its "powerful and moving" portrayal of life for a young African American before and during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Her perspective on life in rural Mississippi reveals the small and large violent acts encountered regularly by numerous African American southerners, especially women. Moody grew up in a household where her mother would suppress any idea of questioning the way things were or the concept of segregation. In 1972, Moody worked as an artist-in-residence in Berlin. She went on to work at Cornell and in 1975, released a collection of short stories entitled Mr. Death: Four Stories. One of the stories, New Hope for the Seventies, won the silver award from Mademoiselle magazine.
She and Austin Straus divorced in 1977. Moody declined to make public appearances or grant interviews, with one exception: the above-mentioned interview with Debra Spencer, in 1985.