An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 1/8/2021
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"I was sick of pretending, sick of selling my feelings for a dollar a day."
Mississippi-born Anne (neé Essie Mae) Moody is another of the lesser-known civil rights heroes from the heyday of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in the 1960's. In May of 1963, while a student at Tougaloo College, Anne participated in a sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Jackson; for which she and other students were first assaulted, then beaten by a mob. One dubious claim to notoriety is Moody being prominently featured at the center of a widely-circulated (and now iconic) photo of the lunch counter mob dumping sugar and mustard on her and several of her fellow students:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/mar/27/hunter-gray-1963-jackson-mississippi-sit-in
Later that year she worked for improved voter registration for Blacks in Canton, earning her a place on the Ku Klux Klan's "hit list." Moody also worked behind-the-scenes to raise funds for the Freedom Riders, and did attend the March on Washington. She later moved to New Orleans, and then to New York. Justifiably exhausted from her efforts, she stepped away from active civil rights work but continued to play a role; at Cornell University she instituted a civil rights training project for its School of Labor Relations.
It was during her time at Cornell that Moody began to write the memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi, which is perhaps her best-known work; recounting her upbringing in heavily segregated times and her involvement in civil rights. The book won the prestigious National Library Association's Best Book of the Year award in 1969. In 1975 she also published Mr. Death, a collection of short stories. Moody lived in Europe for a time but ultimately moved back to her home state of Mississippi in the 1990's, and lived there until her death in 2015.
Read "Coming of Age in Mississippi" at: https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Age-Mississippi-Classic-Autobiography/dp/0440314887
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