The Most Significant Event That Shaped Anne Moody’

2079 Words9 Pages
The Most Significant Event That Shaped Anne Moody’s Growth as a Civil Rights Activist After reading The Coming of Age in Mississippi, it’s very clear that Anne Moody went through a lot of difficult times. From her rough childhood years on the plantation, and her grade school years of moving close to a dozen times to her mixed racial family quarrels in college, and being discriminated due to race and gender, she has many reasons to want to become involved in the Civil Rights Movement. However, in my belief, the “single most important even” that really entwined Anne Moody’s destiny with the civil rights movement was the murder of Emmet Till. In 1955, Anne Moody was just starting her high school years. She was generally busy with school and working for various white families, so she had never really followed or kept up to date with current events. One evening, while walking home form school with a few of her friends, she noticed that the boys, who were usually full of energy and loud, were acting peculiar. Finally, one her older friends, Eddie, suddenly erupted into a cornucopia of yelling and swear words. He proceeds to tell her and the other members of the group that a boy, Emmett Till, had recently been maliciously murdered for flamboyantly complimenting a white woman. Now, while a wolf whistle towards the woman was inappropriate, it wasn’t something to be punishable by death, especially by civilians, regardless of race. Emmett Till’s murder led the young Anne, Essie Mae at the time, to question people in society. Moody stated, “I was 15 years old when I began to hate people (136).” She hated the men that murdered Emmett Till, but the incident brought to her realization that this had been happening for quite a while. She remembered all the bodies of Negroes floating in the river. Obviously she was angry with the white people who were abusing and even murdering

More about The Most Significant Event That Shaped Anne Moody’

Open Document