Anne Moody Biography

American author, born in Centreville, Mississippi, educated at Tougaloo College. Moody worked for the Congress of Racial Equality in Washington DC from 1961 to 1964, when she became a civil rights project co-ordinator at Cornell University. Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968) forms a richly detailed autobiographical account of her impoverished childhood in racially segregated Mississippi and her subsequent involvement in the emergent civil rights movement from the late 1950s onward. It is regarded as one of the most valuable testimonies to the condition of African-American women in the two decades after the Second World War. Moody concludes the book by indicating her disaffection with the civil rights movement, which she began to view as too narrow in its aims to benefit oppressed minorities at a global level. Mr Death, a collection of her short stories, appeared in 1975.