Putting Dreams into action
“By the time we got to the Lincoln Memorial, there were already thousands of people there. I sat on the grass and listened to the speakers, to discover we had dreamers instead of leaders leading us. Just about every one of them stood up there dreaming. Martin Luther King went on and on talking about his dream. I sat there thinking that in Canton we never had time to sleep, much less dream.” This is an excerpt from Anne Moody’s memoir in her autobiography Coming of Age in Mississippi. I believe that in the vision that Anne Moody had throughout her life, this comment is perceived to be true. This excerpt form her memoir is not a valid assessment of the 1963 March on Washington, but rather a result of Anne Moody’s upbringing and her narrow views about how one should live their life. Her problem with Martin Luther King’s speech about having a dream about what the future should be is that she was constantly living her life in fear and trying to get through one day at a time rather than dreaming about what the future might hold. This represents the naïve perspective that many Civil Rights Movement members had at this time, they were living everyday in fear of being killed by angry white mobs. The reasons that Anne Moody has these views on life are a result of her various stages in her life that had such an impact on her. The theme of the book is similar to the genre of my paper in that I am explaining the various stages in her life and how they shaped her views and influenced her actions. The event that foreshadows the injustice that occurs in Anne Moody’s life, or Essie Mae as she is called in the beginning, is when her cousin George Lee is babysitting and burns down the house in a fit of rage. He then proceeds to blame Essie Mae, and when her father returns home, she takes the blame for the fire because she is too passive to stand up for herself. It was during Anne Moody’s childhood she had her first experience engaging with white people. At the beginning of her childhood she perceived Ryan DeFlavio, Page 2 white people to be very different, this was because she was brought up not to interact with them, so she had a sort of fear of them. When Essie Mae goes to visit her grandmother’s house with her uncle Ed, she realizes that two of her uncles, Sam and Walter, are white folks. This shocks her at first, and she is afraid of them, but soon realizes that they don’t treat her any different because she is black.