The 1955 murder of fourteen-year old Emmett Till shocked her: “I hated the white men who murdered Emmett Till and I hated all the other whites who were responsible for the countless murders” she had learned about or “vaguely remembered from childhood. She described how she and her white playmates were forced to sit separately at a movie theater, and later how one of her white employers told her to come into the house through the back door.
The couple had a son, Sascha, before divorcing.īy 1967 Moody set aside activism in favor of writing, publishing her autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi the following year. Other activities led her to jail.Īfter graduation, she spent a year coordinating a civil rights project at Cornell University. She participated in a sit-in at Woolworth’s cafeteria in Jackson, where she and her coworkers were abused by white students for almost three hours until the Tougaloo president and others arrived. At Tougaloo she became a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and an organizer and fundraiser for the Congress of Racial Equality. She began calling herself Anne as a teenager, attended Natchez Junior College for a time, and then earned a bachelor’s degree from Tougaloo College in 1964. Her parents were sharecroppers on a white-owned plantation, and at age nine she went to work for white women to help support her siblings. Moody survived poverty, racism, and patriarchy-problems that only accelerated her eagerness for the freedom and civil rights of African Americans.
Essie Mae Moody, who became an activist and author of one of the most powerful autobiographies written during the civil rights movement, was born on 15 September 1940 in Wilkerson County, Mississippi.
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