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Coming Of Age By Anne Moody

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The famous leader Martin Luther King once said, “Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having their legs off, and then being condemned for being a cripple.” This quote pretty much summed up the way in which African Americans felt during the 1960’s. They had basically no meaning to life. They were irrelevant. Whites wanted no part in them. This was especially the case in the state of Mississippi. Anne Moody, writer of the autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi explains the importance of the civil rights movement in the state of Mississippi and the influence it had on her life and her viewpoint.
Growing up as a poor African American in Mississippi was not always an easy, especially in the 1960’s. It was a time where everyone was segregated. Blacks and whites were treated completely different. They weren’t allowed to eat at the same restaurants, go into the same bathroom, or even drink from the same water fountain. Anne Moody did just that. As just a young girl being raised by extremely poor black family in the South, she personally experienced the difference between the lives of blacks and whites. She was growing up in the middle of the civil rights movement, where African American struggled everyday. At a very young age Moody became challenged by many instances

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