Moody, Anne 1940–

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Moody, Anne 1940–

PERSONAL: Born September 15, 1940, in Wilkerson County, MS; daughter of Fred and Elmire (Williams) Moody; married Austin Stratus, March 9, 1967 (divorced); children: Sascha. Education: Attended Natchez Junior College; Tougaloo College, B.S., 1964.

ADDRESSES: Home—New York, NY. Agent—c/o Harper & Row, 10 East 53rd St., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER: Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Washington, DC, organizer, 1961–63, fundraiser, 1964; Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, civil rights project coordinator, 1964–65; artist in residence in Berlin, Germany, 1972; writer. Counsel for New York City's poverty program, 1967.

MEMBER: International PEN.

AWARDS, HONORS: Brotherhood Award from National Council of Christians and Jews, and Best Book of the Year Award from the National Library Association, both 1969, both for Coming of Age in Mississippi; silver medal from Mademoiselle, 1970, for "New Hopes for the Seventies"; German Academic Exchange Service grant, 1972.

WRITINGS:

Coming of Age in Mississippi (autobiography), Dial (New York, NY), 1968.

Mr. Death: Four Stories, foreword by John Donovan, Harper (New York, NY), 1975.

Contributor to Ms. and Mademoiselle.

ADAPTATIONS: A sound recording, Anne Moody Reads Her Mr. Death and Bobo, was produced by Caedmon in 1980.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Variations on a Dream of Death, short stories; Black Womans Book; The Clay Gully, a novel.

SIDELIGHTS: In Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody mined her experiences of racism and discrimination as the oldest of nine children of rural Mississippi sharecroppers. Widely anthologized, Moody's autobiography has become a civil rights era classic. In a profile for the University of Minnesota's Web-based Voices from the Gaps project, researchers noted that the narrative "examines the issues of the awakening civil rights movement, the youth movement and the emergence of her feminist consciousness." They added that the "compelling story" reflects Moody's prose style: "angry, blunt, and incredibly powerful."

As a child, Moody helped her family by cleaning houses. She attended segregated schools, where she excelled, and earned a basketball scholarship to Natchez Junior College. A civil rights activist throughout the 1960s, she participated in the March on Washington and developed a close professional relationship with Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. But her relationship with the movement soured. As Moody later commented: "In the beginning I never really saw myself as a writer. I was first and foremost an activist in the civil rights movement in Mississippi. When I could no longer see that anything was being accomplished by our work there, I left and went north. I came to see through my writing that no matter how hard we in the Movement worked, nothing seemed to change; that we made a few visible little gains, yet at the root, things always remained the same; and that the Movement was not in control of its destiny—nor did we have any means of gaining control of it. We were like an angry dog on a leash that had turned on its master. It could bark and howl and snap, and sometimes even bite, but the master was always in control."

She continued, "I realized that the universal fight for human rights, dignity, justice, equality, and freedom is not and should not be just the fight of the American Negro or the Indians or the Chicanos, it's the fight of every ethnic and racial minority, every suppressed and exploited person, every one of the millions who daily suffer one or another of the indignities of the powerless and voiceless masses. And this trend of thinking is what finally brought about an end to my involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, especially as it began to splinter and get more narrowly nationalistic in its thinking."

Moody went on to publish essays and a collection of short stories. Rumors abound about her activities since the 1970s, but she grants no interviews and seems to have withdrawn from public life.