The cultural transition from youth to adulthood in the United States is often a period of primarily physical maturation, accompanied by progressive changes in perception of the world around us. Anne Moody's years growing up in Mississippi were marked by often violent racism, regardless of the emancipation of African-American slaves some 80 years earlier. The laws of many of the former Confederate states, such as Mississippi's Black Codes, often included provisions to severely limit the rights of African Americans. Steps like Mississippi's vagrancy law, which fined "idle" blacks, illustrate this through subtle encouragement to keep blacks in their former place of servitude. Anne Moody's coming of age in the era of the oppressive Black Codes was not only a physical change, but more importantly a mental growth from a victim of the injustices of the Southern United States to an active agent of change for her fellow Africans. Americans. Growing up as the daughter of sharecroppers in Mississippi, Essie Mae Moody experienced and observed the social and economic deprivation of black Southerners. As a young girl, Essie Mae and her family struggled to survive, often on scraps from the tables of the white families her mother worked for. Knowing little else other than the squalor of their living conditions, he becomes aware of this disparity while living in a two-room house off the property of the Johnsons, for whom his mother worked, watching white children play: “Here they were playing in a house that was more beautiful than any house I could have dreamed of” (p. 33). Furthermore, the segregated school he attended was a “one-room rotten wooden building.” (p. 14), but Essie Mae manages to get good grades while taking care of her younger brother...... middle of paper ......rence against members of the movement. However, the emphasis on voting rights and not on improving economic conditions led Anne to believe that the movement “had “dreamers” rather than leaders to guide us.” (p.337). Anne Moody was a firsthand part of the civil rights movement, but as she came of age as a civil rights worker she came to doubt the movement's ability to make real, concrete change for its people. Many of the leaders of Canton's voter registration movement languished in prison, and its people languished in the segregated South. The willingness of whites to maintain their own racist attitudes, and the willingness of her own people to accept "We're not big enough to do it alone" (p. 424), led her to doubt her people's ability to overcome discrimination, as Anne responds to chants of we will overcome with “I wonder. I really wonder" (p. 424).