Anarchism

Anarchafeminism

Anarchist University

The Civil Rights Movement and the Struggle Against White Supremacy: Learning From Anne Moody's Autobiography "Coming of Age in Mississippi"

reviewed by Chris Crass

Anne Moody grew up in the time period after the second world war. She entered college in the late 50's and by the early 60's she had joined the student organized and lead sit-in movement and took part in the movement that would challenge one of the fundamental principles upon which the US has been organized; the ideology and institutionalization of white supremacy.

World War II forever altered international power relationships between nations, and simultaneously created new dynamics in race and sex power relationships in the United States. As hundreds of thousands of white working men went off to fight in W.W.II, people of color and white women entered the work force as never before. It was not that white women and people of color had not participated in the paid labor force, rather it was the kind of work and employment opportunities that were open for the first time due to the massive shortage in white male workers. Industrial jobs had long been the sole province of white men. They were unionized jobs, and paid well.

The jobs also had a certain amount of social prestige, as real working class jobs that paid a "family wage". While race and sex oppression continued to segregate the work force during W.W.II, the number of people of color and white women who held well paying, unionized jobs created a momentum for economic equality and social justice that manifested itself in the civil rights movement, the Black power movement, and the women's liberation movement.

World War II also created the conditions for politicizing large numbers of men of color who participated in the war effort. Men of color who fought in W.W.II where sent to fight in countries that had cultures different from the US. Men of color experienced US segregation in the military, while being stationed in countries that did not segregate by the standards of the US (their was still segregation on the basis of class, national origin, and often times on immigration status). Further, men of color who risked their lives defending "democracy and freedom" for the world, returned to the racism of the US that denied them participation in democracy and outlawed their freedom. The politicizing of veterans of color after W.W.II is documented not only in the Black community, but in the Latino/a community as well.

World War II also ushered in a new international political order in which the United States reigned as a super power. After W.W.II, part of the policies that were decided at the Bretton Woods Conference which brought together the victorious parties of W.W.II in order to structure a new world order, was that of decolonization. Wars for independence rocked colonial powers after W.W.II into the 50s and 60s. Wars for independence were fought in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to free themselves of European colonization. While the policy of decolonization sounds rather progressive, it was a tactic of a larger economic strategy of replacing political colonization with economic neocolonialism. However, the wars for independence did create meaningful changes, and the voices of the third world where making themselves heard in the newly formed United Nations. In the context of third world independence, and policies of decolonization, the status of African Americans in the United States as an essentially colonized people raised many questions.

In the US efforts were made by many in the ruling class to create racial harmony. Historian Paula Giddings has shown that efforts on the part of whites in the US to address issues of racial inequality, have generally been efforts to create harmony between Blacks and whites, rather than equality. Giddings explains that the reasons for white attempts to secure racial harmony have been economic; after W.W.II this effort to create racial harmony was increased due to international pressures from the third world, and from the internal pressures of the oppressed themselves. An example of this strategy is the Brown vs. Board of Education. This legal victory won through the efforts of the NAACP was a fundamental change from the previous legal structuring of "separate, but equal", and legally outlawed racial segregation in public schools. However, the law makers, the federal government, the business community made little to no efforts to enforce desegregation, to alter the structures of power that were built on the basis of white supremacy. The people themselves made desegregation a reality, the civil rights movement was born out of the passion for equality, and was radicalized by the failure of the ruling class to enforce their own laws and protect the rights of all citizens for which it claimed responsibility for.

Mississippi during this time period from the end of W.W.II through the 60s was know as a closed society where the traditions of white supremacy were celebrated and white society declared their loyalty to segregation and white supremacy. Mississippi was not alone in their loyalty to traditional white society, rather they were among the most violent, and as it was an economically poor state had the least to lose in refusing to create racial harmony for the sake of business and capital growth.

Anne Moody repeated writes about her feelings of intolerance for racism, of her desire to speak out when white people assert their power and privilege, and of her yearning to take action and change society. She writes about her frustration with others in the Black community who are submissive, who do not raise their voices, who live in fear. Her desire for change alienates her from her mother, from many in the generation of Black people before her. Her life is a living chronicle of the changes that were taking place historically, and that would help create the conditions for a mass movement working for the change Moody envisions as a girl working in white women's homes and living with racial violence and oppression from white society.

Coming of Age in Mississippi traces Moody's life from her childhood, to high school, to college, and finally into the movement. Moody vividly looks back at her life, and gives the reader a sense of what it felt like to be Black, to be a young girl and then woman, to be poor, to be hurt by the everyday racist interactions that take place, to be in fear of white violence, to be outraged by the vanity, arrogance, and privilege of white society that has been produced from the oppression and exploitation of Black people.

Reading Moody's living history helped me understand the human, emotional side of the civil rights movement, and what compelled people to risk everything for freedom. I've read many times before about the murder of Emmett Till, but it wasn't until I read about what it meant to Moody, and what it was like to asked by whites about it, that I could better understand this pivotal moment in history.

"Before Emmett Till's murder, I had know the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me - the fear of being killed just because I was black. This was the worst of my fears."

"I was fifteen years old when I began to hate people. I hated the white men who murdered Emmett Till and I hated all other whites who were responsible for the countless murders... But I also hated Negroes. I hated them for not standing up and doing something about the murders."

These feelings and emotions are usually lost in history books about the movement that was in part motivated by such emotions and feelings. This is what has been most valuable from reading Coming of Age. To read the amazing description of her sit-in at Woolworth's, and her fear of assassination while trying to sleep in a movement freedom house, bring the activism of the civil rights movement alive. Moody taught me about what it felt like to be a Black activist risking her life to fight racism, to be exiled from her hometown, to fear and face reprisals against her family for her activism, to be a civil rights worker in Mississippi.

Moody's political outlook and activist strategy can be understood by looking at her activism and the organizing that she engaged in. Her political strategy was integrationist, in that she spoke equal access, equal opportunity, and racial equality with white people. She also worked in alliance with white people in her sit-in protests, and I believe that the strong relationships that she developed with some of the white civil rights workers were examples of people challenging racism and creating the "beloved community". The other aspect of her politics that I want to discuss is of her worldview in terms of the way that she and the movement in general organized.

She worked primarily with the Congress Of Racial Equality but there was a lot of coalition work with other groups, primarily with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee which had long played a principal role in organizing in Mississippi. The organizing was done in large part by affinity groups that operated rather autonomously in day-to-day work, but worked in a larger federation of such groups. In the book I've Got the Light of Freedom: the organizing tradition and the Mississippi freedom struggle by Charles Payne, he studies the movement, the way it organized. He describes the organizing tradition as, "the developmental perspective, an emphasis on building relationships, respect for collective leadership, for bottom up change, the expansive sense of how democracy ought to operate in everyday life, the emphasis on building for the long haul, the anti-bureaucratic ethos, the preference for addressing local issues..."

The movement in Mississippi worked to abolish jim crow laws of segregation and discrimination, and the political strategy of this struggle was integrationist. The way that many in the movement, particularly SNCC that initiated the Freedom Summer Project that Moody was an organizer in, aimed at changing human relationships, aimed at developing personal and collective empowerment, aimed at making a radically different world that strove to be egalitarian, cooperative, and non-violent. This vision of radical democracy, of egalitarianism, and antiauthoritarianism that influenced the way that people worked in the movement, the way that people organized greatly contributed to the long term effects of the civil rights movement in Mississippi.

Debbie Louis, activist and author of the book, And We Are Not Saved: a history of the movement as people, wrote, "Although there were no great visible changes in Mississippi at the close of the Summer Project, it had been responsible for what James W. Silver calls 'cracks in the pillars that upheld the cruel edifice of Mississippi society'... all this [activism of the summer project, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the press coverage of brutality] led to significant departure on many levels from a long-defended, inflexible caste system on which every aspect of the 'closed society' was based... For the first time, the moral and political bankruptcy which sustained traditional Mississippi could no longer be conveniently ignored by anyone."

The principles of this organizing tradition have influenced many of the movements for social justice that have emerged since the civil rights movement, and it is this strategy that holds revolutionary possibilities.

Moody's autobiography puts the humanity into these organizational models. She writes about the day after day canvassing of Black communities to try to get people to vote, of the free clothing and food giveaways, of the personal pleasure she has when she buys neighborhood children clothes for school from her movement check.

Aside from looking at the movement, there were several themes that Moody discusses in her autobiography that should be highlighted. She writes in the section on her childhood about the color bias in the Black community resulting from internalized racism. Her mother is never excepted by her second husbands family because of her darker complexion, and Moody and her immediate siblings are treated poorly in the larger family because they are much darker then the two white children that are most revered. The way that racism has become internalized in the Black community and manifested itself in a desire for near-white complexion, near-white hair, near-white features, and such has deeply effected Black people of all complexions, and especially Black women who are conditioned under patriarchy to view their worth through dominant notions of beauty that are defined by white supremist standards.

The other theme that is develop throughout the book is that of integration as a political strategy and moral committment. While reading Anne Moody, I also read Assata Shukar's autobiography. Reading the two books back to back made for good comparisons of Moody's integrationist politics to Shukar's Black nationalist politcs and strategy. While a great deal has been written on these two major tendencies of Black radical politics and activism, I will just briefly discuss it.

Assata Shakur becomes an activist during the period when the civil rights movement is evolving into the Black Power movement. A central concept of the Black Power movement is self-determination for Black communities. While many people argue that integrationist and Black Nationalist politics are polar opposites, I disagree strongly. They are each strategies coming out of the desire for Black liberation and freedom. The means by which these ends may be different in some regards, but the fundamental commitment to Black empowerment, and Black liberation from race and class oppression are consistent through each strategy. vWhat did change was the way that these strategies were being organized around. Women played fundamental roles in the civil rights movement, and in Mississippi in particular (Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hammer, Annie Devine, Victoria Gray). While women continued to play crucial roles in the Black Power movement, there was an assertion of patriarchal models in some aspects of the Black Power movement. Assata describes this as does Elaine Brown in her book "Taste of Power".

On the issue of gender and organization, Charles Payne writes, "Many of the developments that came to bedevil some movement organizations after the mid-sixties - the loss of emphasis on developing others, the inability to maintain effective human relationships, the romanticizing of violence and confrontation, the shift from movement-as- community to movement-as-political-party, the development of more self-aggrandizing, self-publicizing leadership styles - could all be though of as shifts away from behavior patterns that in this society are socially coded as feminine and towards patterns socially coded as masculine, expressed most vividly by those nationalist organizations that as a matter of policy expected women to take a step back."

Assata was carrying one the organizing tradition of people like Ella Baker, and that is what made her so dangerous, and the need to marginalize her in the Black Power movement was a priority of the FBI.

Reading the two autobiographies one after the other showed how the lived history and experience of Moody feed right into the historical period that Assata experienced; the civil rights movement helped develop the conditions and the experiences that lead to the Black Power movement. While Moody organized with CORE and SNCC, Assata organized with the Black Panther Party. While Moody feared and experienced reprisals on herself and her family from the Klan, Assata feared and experienced reprisals on herself and family by the cops and the FBI. Each was dedicated to the liberation of her people, and each has valuable knowledge gained from their lived experience facing and resisting oppression for activists of today who desperately need to be schooled on the history of the Black liberation struggle.