Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody

Anne Moody tells her life from when she was small to age 24, growing up in rural Mississippi. The book was published in 1968, when she was 28.  Online, you can only see a few pictures of her, because since then she has kept herself out of the limelight.  Her story made an enormous impact on the country at the time, particularly among educated whites who were ignorant of what sort of life blacks were living at that time – whether in the Northern cities or in Mississippi where Anne grew up.  Smart, determined to be educated and to make something of herself, Anne lived in a world where “her kind” was ostracized from opportunity and kept so by the threat of violence and reprisal against anyone trying to change their world. 

Anne early on saw the dilemma her race was chained to, and she did try to walk the line - to survive but to keep her soul intact.   While working for white women, some tried to break her spirit, while others gave her the nurturing she needed.  She had to make hard decisions about where to go and who to live with.   She attended college only to realize there were no jobs waiting for her – unless she wanted to be a teacher and support the “separate but equal” establishment that helped ensure blacks’ secondary status.

In the end, there was the Movement.  Anne joined the NCAAP in Jackson, Mississippi, where she was going to college.  She writes stirringly of the hard work and dedication shown by many like herself, and by people who had come down to the South to try and register blacks to vote.  But they were living with fear.  Being followed by cars out on country dirt roads at night, men busting into their houses looking for them, groups of KKK’s burning houses - houses with children inside.  Anne breaks up her time with the Movement by going and living with relatives in New Orleans, where she waitresses and tries to forget the oppression that exists in Southern rural areas. 

Ironically enough, it was when she started writing her story that Anne felt the impossibility of reversing people’s views and ever eradicating racism.  When she heard Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in Washington, she didn’t share his exultation.  Now, over 40 years later, blacks and whites do work and attend school together, but inequalities persist.  Many young blacks don’t learn how to handle expectations of a generic workplace – they are tuned into their inner culture, not getting fitted to balance the demands of the outside world with their own need for affirmation.  Almost all teens have a time of breaking away and experimenting with what they want, what they think is important.  But some young people have an easier way back - back to school, to college, to jobs that can get you somewhere.

Why is her book still important?  Because she makes it real.  She doesn’t hide her feelings - whether it’s about her absent father, having white teachers for the first time in college, meeting gay people in the workplace, or her mother being hostile to her because Anne is trying to fight this thing, this life. 

I’m glad we have the book in our library, and I recommend it to everyone.  I wish she would tell the rest of her story.   You can access the catalog record here.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Published in 2009, this book centers on an issue raised by the development of medical science and the progress of medical research. Researchers tried for a long time to find cells that would never stop growing, cells that would not die. A 31 year old African-American woman contracted cervical cancer which was diagnosed at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, in February of 1951. She was treated with radium, the latest development in cancer treatment, which seemed to get rid of her tumor. However, she had pains again by June. At first the doctors found nothing, but after some weeks had passed, they discovered more tumors. She was given radiation to no avail and died in October, 1951. Her name was Henrietta Lacks. A researcher at the hospital was given some of her cells from the original tumor. Her doctor did not need permission to do this, and even today consent would not be required by law. All blood and other tissue material taken for diagnostic purposes by the medical profession are not considered the property of the patient that undergoes the tests or procedures or operations.

Although Henrietta died, her cancer cells did not. As the author of the book explains to us, although the cells taken were cancerous, they still behaved like cells in many ways and could be used in research. They were the first cells to regenerate infinitely. Eventually HeLa cells, as they were called, were used to find a vaccine for polio, and have been used all over the world to help treat leukemia, influenza, herpes, Parkinson’s disease and to work on cures for cancer and many other illnesses.

Since Henrietta’s cancer cells have been used so extensively, their existence represents millions of dollars paid for their use in research, as well as the profits reaped from the drugs that they helped to make. Rebecca Skloot’s book presents in detail not only the development of the HeLa cells, but how Henrietta’s surviving family was impacted: first by her death, and then by their slow realization of how powerful this legacy was that she inadvertently left to the world.

The author, Ms. Skloot, is a key player in that realization process, describing how over a 10-year span she slowly got to know Henrietta’s family, trying to convince them that she wanted to tell the world about Henrietta, not just her cells. They are a family in tough circumstances, struggling to get by, not being able to afford any health insurance – an ironic note, considering what their mother’s cells have done for modern medicine.

In the end, this is a book to read for the story of the family, and how for all our advances, so many people live lives untouched by the benefits of those advances. The issue of proprietary rights regarding our bodies is addressed in the book, but to no real conclusion. Science and pharmacology wants a free hand in using these parts of us, and the Lacks family has no desire to restrict research and to impede the fight against disease. What they desire is recognition and acknowledgment that it was the malignancy which she personally suffered and died from that became a milestone for the rest of the human race.

Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision by Peter Irons

Peter Irons, professor emeritus of political science at the University of alifornia at San Diego, wrote this book in 2002. Eight years later, its message still speaks to what we offer as education to our children. Irons traces the beginnings of American slaves seeking equality, noting how any education they acquired helped fuel their efforts to be citizens in their own right. We see Thurgood Marshall, the black lawyer fighting for the right for African-Americans to be educated in white schools from 1936 to 1954, when the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka struck down the idea that separate schools could ever be equal, because of the slur and the indignity such schools inflicted on the hearts and minds of African-American children.

But the battle was not over by any means. Irons goes on to show how school district after school district resisted integration, complaining about federal interference and in many cases insisting that their schools were open to all, explaining segregation as a matter of neighborhoods, where people happened to live. Busing was finally introduced in many areas to facilitate integration, and caused a backlash of anger from many white parents and community leaders, leading to violence in some cases. Irons follows this “winding-down” of integration tactics as equality through bussing became less and less popular, with a majority of Supreme Court justices reflecting these sentiments.

Irons concludes that segregation is alive and well in this country, since most African-American students attend schools that have mostly black students, and that most white students attend schools with only a few minority students. The fact that schools serve their neighborhoods is an indication to many that segregation is a fact, one that people have chosen. Irons, however, cites statistics to show the crushing and debilitating impact that substandard schools have on their students, failing to offer an opportunity for these children to achieve something for themselves or for their communities.