¶ … Coming of Age in Mississippi" by Anne Moody
In her article "Coming of Age in Mississippi," dating from 1968, Anne Moody tells the story of her participation in a blood shed sit-in demonstration at Woolworth's lunch counter. She was a student at Toogalo College in Jackson Mississippi, member of the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). The Association, under the leadership of John Salter, Moody's social science professor, undertook a boycott in public stores as one of the numerous forms of manifestation within the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi. The story begins with three young African-American students were peacefully asking for the right to be served at the same lunch counter where the whites were sitting.
With a lack of sentimentality and with deliberate detachment, Moody succeeds to present a realistic picture of the heaviest segregated place on earth in the sixties, Jackson, Mississippi. Moody, along with a few fellow students, sat on stools, at the counter where only the white people were supposed to be served and confronted the mob. All along her story, the author underlines the fact that the mass media and the police were present, but did not interfere to protect the innocents.
In spite of the calm and detached tone, the author describes events full of acts of violence and hatred. White people indoctrinated over centuries to think that their African-American fellow citizens were...
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