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Coming From Mississippi

While reading this book, I came across issues that I had already learned about in school over the years. I knew that for a least the past sixty years there has been some sort of conflict between the perceived to be white race and the perceived to be black race. No one really remembers how it all stared but the snowball effect had taken shape and it very rapidly spun out of control. Coming of Age in Mississippi written by Anne Moody was different however because it gave us an inside look as to how the black people in the heart of it all were directly affected. I have always read a unbiased version of this story and have never been able to relate to what I was reading simply because there was no emotion on the page but I found that this time around I had no problem feeling sorry and hurting for Anne Moody and her family. This book looks at all aspects of the Civil Rights era and gives examples to almost every sub topic but the subject that struck a cord for me was appearance. I am a woman of mixed decent and I have heard in life time people call me yellow and I never thought anything of it until I read in the book that they used that same term to describe a black person with a lighter complexion. This played a huge role in the black community back during that time and it is still relevant today. It caused a black vs. black hatred and it divided the community at a time when they needed to come together the most. This idea that the lighter young skin is, the better you are still plays a role in the black communities around the nation today. This book has many examples of when it first started the turning point for light skinned blacks.
The first time that I came across the term yellow or "high yellow" in the book was when Essie Mae was describing Florence. She was Essie father's best friends widow who he ending up leaving her mother for. "Florence was a mulatto, high yellow with straight hair. She was the envy of all the women on the plantation" (Moody,...