By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS for the Associated Press on February 7, 2015—
“Anne Moody, whose memoir “Coming of Age in Mississippi” gave a wrenching account of growing up poor in the segregated South and facing violence as a civil rights activist, died Thursday at her home in the small town Gloster, Mississippi. She was 74.
Moody had dementia the past several years and stopped eating two days before she died in her sleep, her sister, Adline Moody, told The Associated Press on Saturday.
On May 28, 1963, Anne Moody was among the students from historically black Tougaloo College who staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Jackson, Mississippi. A white mob attacked the integrated group of peaceful students, dousing them with ketchup, mustard and sugar and beating one of the men.
A photograph from the sit-in shows Moody sitting stoically at the five-and-dime counter with food on her head. Moody’s eyes are downcast as a man pours more food on one of her fellow students, Joan Trumpauer.
Moody wrote in her 1968 memoir that “all hell broke loose” after she and two other black students, Memphis Norman and Pearlena Lewis, prayed at the lunch counter.”
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HUMAN RIGHTS SOCIETY 