Always in the Mood for Moody: Teaching History through Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi

Abstract

© 2015 by the board of trustees of the university of ill inois In my search for a way of teaching American history as something that truly belongs to women and to men, to the powerful as well as to those who lack power in a formal sense, as something that is not the story of white people with an unusually interesting person of color charitably thrown in for good measure, I have found several popular texts that have functioned to change the classroom conversation in substantive and foundational ways, permitting students not only to see and understand what it meant to be young, female, and poor, for instance, in another time and place, but to explain to students why and how significant historical changes occurred and occurred precisely because of what it meant to be young, female, and poor at that particular moment. While many influential writings on African American women’s autobiography and civil rights activism have shaped my thinking and form an implicit theoretical framework for this essay, the preeminent teaching text in my arsenal of those that make all the difference in my typical, large, freshman-level college survey of United States history, one I have most often taught at an open-enrollment second-tier state university, is the perennially popular civil rights era memoir first published in 1968 by Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi. Typically classified as “juvenile” or “adolescent” literature, Moody’s text has not been viewed as important for its literary features (see for instance: http://www. enotes.com/coming-age-mississippi -salem). Its very popularity—the fact that my students are always “in the mood for Moody”—and the pop cultural features of this text (not only its style but its content) offer opportunities for classroom analysis inquiry that no other text or work of literature I have assigned provides. The historical evidence that this young, rural, impoverished, black woman’s memoir brings to students’ consciousness pulls together all the political, economic, and social history about the civil rights movement as well as the biggest events and developments in the United States of the middle years of the twentieth century that I hope to explain, all the while packaging it in a compelling narrative that humanizes rural African American women as subjectsin-the-making forging historical change rather than as inert objects to whom history has happened. Most importantly, Moody’s accessible memoir allows stuAlways in the Mood for Moody: Teaching History through Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi