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

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.