The book covers Moody's life from childhood through her mid twenties, including her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement beginning when she was a student at the historically black Tougaloo College.
[2] On October 13, 2023 Anne Moody was posthumously inducted into the Tougaloo College National Alumni Association Hall of Fame at a banquet ceremony held in Jackson, Mississippi.
Moody became involved early in the Civil Rights Movement, helping organize the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and participating in a Woolworth's sit-in on May 28, 1963[6][7][8].
After graduation from Tougaloo College, Moody moved to Ithaca, New York, where she was coordinator of the civil rights training project at Cornell University until 1965.
Moody begins her story on the plantation where she lives with her mother Toosweet and her father Diddly, both sharecroppers, and her younger sister, Adline.
Moody moves with her mother and younger siblings to town to live with her great aunt and begins grade school.
At nine years old, Moody begins her first job sweeping a porch, earning seventy-five cents a week and two gallons of milk.
During her first year in high school, Emmett Till, an innocent 14-year-old black boy visiting Mississippi from Chicago, is tortured and murdered for allegedly whistling in a flirtatious and offensive manner at a white woman.
She not only answers Moody's questions about Emmett Till and the NAACP, but she volunteers a great deal more information about the state of race relations in Mississippi.
While in Baton Rouge, Moody learns some tough lessons when she is ripped off by a white family for two weeks' pay, and when she is betrayed by a co-worker, which resulted in her losing her job.
During her second year at Natchez College, she helps organize a successful boycott of the campus cafeteria when a student finds a maggot in her plate of grits.
On a shopping trip there with Rose, a fellow student from Tougaloo College, Moody – without any planning or support mechanism in place – decides to go into the "Whites Only" section of the Trailways bus depot.
When Moody is escorted out of Woolworth's by Dr. Beittel, she realizes that "about ninety white police officers had been standing outside the store; they had been watching the whole thing through the windows, but had not come in to stop the mob or do anything.
In the chapters that follow she comments on the impact of the assassinations of Medgar Evers and President John F. Kennedy on the Civil Rights Movement, and the escalating turmoil across the South.
[17] The short final chapter ends with her joining a busload of civil rights workers on their way to Washington, D.C. As the bus moves through the Mississippi landscape, her fellow travelers sing the anthem of the Movement.