Obstacles To Unity

Obstacles to Unity

Coming Of Age In Mississippi, Anne Moody's poignant autobiographical account of growing up black in Mississippi in the years surrounding the Civil Rights Movement, allows us to peer through a window into a world that no textbook could accurately represent. What we see forces us to discard any illusions of the Movement: that it was an effortless transition to improved race-relations, that it consisted of a unified Southern black front battling segregation and white oppression, and that the aims of the Movement were satisfied by its end in the 6os. The image of Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking to the masses about his dream for the nation during the March on Washington rally at the Lincoln Memorial has come to symbolize the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement. Moody's firsthand experience paints a different picture, detailing the struggle and division that served as obstacles to the Movement and to the unity of the black community as a whole. The black South, as depicted in Moody's autobiography, was deeply divided internally by issues of skin tone, economics and age, and externally faced with manipulation and intimidation by whites, factors that together proved a formidable adversary to the unity of the Southern black population.

Despite the tendency to view black Americans as a single group, Moody describes the stratifications that existed within the Southern black communities she grew up amongst. Her early memory of her father's mistress, Florence, for whom he left Moody's mother, recalls Florence as "a mulatto, high yellow with straight black hair," "the envy of all the women on the plantation." A mulatto was a person of light brown, or "yellow" skin who was of mixed descent, part Negro, and part Caucasian. Moody's testimony clearly shows that feelings of superiority existed among those of lighter skin tone, as with Florence. Another example of this racial stratification is seen when Raymond's family is introduced into Moody's life. She describes Raymond and his mother, Miss Pearl, as "real yellow people." She soon associated this difference with the fact that Raymond's family refused to accept her mother, who "wasn't yellow" ; "Miss Pearl and Raymond's older sisters would pass right by [Mama]." When she began attending Centreville Baptist, where Raymond and his family attended, she recounts an experience in the parking lot after the service: "As Mama stood looking at [Miss Pearl and Betty] she had tears in her eyes. She had hoped that they would at least speak to her. But they pretended they didn't even see us." Anne, recognizing this blatant discrimination by Raymond's family and its affect on her mother, undoubtedly formed opinions regarding the "superiority" of these lighter skinned mulattoes. Later, speaking of her father's new wife, Emma, Moody observes: "she was the first high yellow Negro I had seen who didn't think or act like she was any better than darker Negroes." Moody, then, obviously struggled with the discriminatory behavior exhibited by some of her own race. We can see the depth of this schism in the black community even more clearly when Anne is accepted to Tougaloo College, and advised: "Tougaloo was not for people my colorÐ'.... Ð''you're too black. You gotta be high yellowÐ'...'" Even Moody's language reveals the split between the light and dark skinned Negroes, referring to darker skinned blacks collectively as "people my color," as if the two shades comprised entirely separate races. The rift created by the attitudes of blacks toward differing skin tones within their own race undoubtedly served to undermine the movement to unite the black community under the banner of civil rights.

Due to the pervading conditions of poverty that afflicted most southern blacks prior to and during the civil rights era, the issue of economics was another major source of tension within the black community. Born and raised in extreme poverty, Anne Moody and her family struggled to keep food on the table, and she remembers "we ate beans all the time," and "Mama was trying to buy clothes for the three of us, feed us and keep us in school. She just couldn't do it on five dollars a week." Moody would later encounter the same poverty working with CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) in Canton, Mississippi. Sympathizing with the five children of a single mother, Moody felt that "the life these kids were leading was a replica of [her] own past." The poverty that many southern blacks faced proved a huge obstacle to uniting them for the cause of civil rights. In Canton, where blacks outnumbered whites 29,000 to 9,000, Moody had little success in trying to convince blacks to register to vote, finding "they are too insecureÐ'--either they work for Miss Ann or they live on Mr. Charlie's place." Most of the struggling blacks in the community labored under white employers or sharecropped white land, so the fear of losing their livelihood outweighed their desire to take part in elections. When soliciting voters at local Negro churches, Moody realized that even blacks who had found economic security, "the schoolteachers and the middle-class professional Negroes," "dared not participate. They knew that once they did, they would lose that $250 a month job." In order to vote as a black, you must be willing to risk your job and your safety, resign yourself to the possibility that the next day you might be out of a job, in jail, or dead. So the black majority, who might have dominated the elections on the strength of their numbers, was again divided.

Perhaps the greatest dividing factor of the black South was age. Moody represents the young civil rights activist,