Ann Moody's "Coming of Age in Mississippi" for US History After 1865.

"Coming of Age in Mississippi" is the 1968 autobiography of author Anne Moody's maturity from a child, to a high school and college student, and then into an active participant in the civil rights movement. Moody portrays her black family living in the rural South and her involvement with such groups as the NAACP and the CORE. She ends her novel with an ambivalent tone that conveys her insecurity about the future of the movement. Throughout …

…that whites have "a disease, an incurable disease in its final stage," and asks, "What [are] our chances against such a disease (267)?" Perhaps she feels that the words of the song "We Shall Overcome" are true: "The truth will make us free some day [. . .] we shall overcome some day (384)." She may be uncertain of the short-term future of the movement, but "I wonder" if she truly believes that the Negroes will overcome racism "some day (384)."