Historians and Ethics: Finding Anne Moody

Anne Moody is best known for her 1968 autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi, which documented her first twenty-two years growing up in the Magnolia State, and her activism as part of the mass movement for civil rights before she fled the South. While the book was an instant success, assigned for decades in schools, colleges, and universities, we know little about Moody’s life thereafter. This essay tackles some of that history, and delves into the ethics of finding someone who did not want to be found and left nothing for researchers—yet a few legally obtained boxes containing sensitive personal information that highlighted trauma and mental illness became available for a couple of years in a university archive. The essay discusses some of the ethical issues historians must navigate as they follow research leads, and implicitly underscores the importance of personal and professional integrity in the method and product historians utilize and create.

Coming of Age with Anne Moody

This essay offers a close reading of Anne Moody’s widely read but under-theorized memoir of the civil rights movement, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968). This essay’s focus mirrors a main focus in Moody’s narrative: her relationship with her mother. Much of the body of literary criticism, as well as historical writings dealing with African American mother-daughter conflict, centers on the observation that Black mothers have often found themselves in conflict with daughters whom they seek to protect by schooling them in accommodationist behavior to better survive in the face of white racism and violence. To strand the analysis there, however, leaves one unable to understand the historically specific nature of the acute generational conflict between Moody and her mother and leaves one without structural explanation for young people’s unprecedented involvement in the 1950s–1960s civil rights movement. This article explores Anne Moody’s daughterly point of view as expressed in her writing to understand why and how Anne was able to develop a distinct sense of self and consciousness, one that alienated her from her mother and laid the groundwork for her activist leadership as well as that of her generational cohort.