The unforgettable memoir of a woman at the front lines of the civil rights movement—a harrowing account of black life in the rural South and a powerful affirmation of one person’s ability to affect change. “Anne Moody’s autobiography is an eloquent, moving testimonial to her courage.”—Chicago Tribune Born to a poor couple who were tenant farmers on a plantation in Mississippi, Anne Moody lived through some of the most dangerous days of the pre-civil rights era in the South. The week before she began high school came the news of Emmet Till’s lynching. Before then, she had “known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was . . . the fear of being killed just because I was black.” In that moment was born the passion for freedom and justice that would change her life. A straight-A student who realized her dream of going to college when she won a basketball scholarship, she finally dared to join the NAACP in her junior year. Through the NAACP and later through CORE and SNCC, she experienced firsthand the demonstrations and sit-ins that were the mainstay of the civil rights movement—and the arrests and jailings, the shotguns, fire hoses, police dogs, billy clubs, and deadly force that were used to destroy it. A deeply personal story but also a portrait of a turning point in our nation’s destiny, this autobiography lets us see history in the making, through the eyes of one of the footsoldiers in the civil rights movement. Praise for Coming of Age in Mississippi “A history of our time, seen from the bottom up, through the eyes of someone who decided for herself that things had to be changed . . . a timely reminder that we cannot now relax.”—Senator Edward Kennedy, The New York Times Book Review “Something is new here . . . rural southern black life begins to speak. It hits the page like a natural force, crude and undeniable and, against all principles of beauty, beautiful.”—The Nation “Engrossing, sensitive, beautiful . . . so candid, so honest, and so touching, as to make it virtually impossible to put down.”—San Francisco Sun-Reporter

With contributions from Elizabeth Aydelott, Fred Banks, Jimmy Buffett, Edward Cohen, Maggie Wade Dixon, Ellen Douglas, W. Ralph Eubanks, Richard Ford, Gwendolyn Gong, Carolyn Haines, Lorian Hemingway, Samuel Jones, Robert Khayat, B. B. King, John Maxwell, Alberto Mora, Donald Peterson, Noel Polk, Jerry Rice, George Riggs, Robert St. John, Sid Salter, Constance Slaughter-Harvey, Elizabeth Spencer, Clifton Taulbert, Keith Tonkel, Sela Ward, Wyatt Waters, Jim Weatherly, and William Winter Growing Up in Mississippi shares experiences and impressions from a multifaceted group representing all areas of the state and many professions, talents, and temperaments. Parents, teachers, churches, communities, landscape, and historical context profoundly influenced these men and women when they were young. In his revealing foreword, Richard Ford explores the very essence of influence and illustrates his conclusions by recalling an indelible incident between his mother and himself in the front yard of their home on Congress Street in Jackson, Mississippi. The volume then showcases poignant memories of other distinguished individuals: a governor and statesman, journalists, a news anchor, a playwright, novelists, memoirists, a publisher, a minister, educators and scholars, judges and lawyers, a test pilot and astronaut, a renowned watercolorist, a celebrated actress, and many more. Spanning more than five decades, these essays give us a glimpse of the people and places that nurtured these outstanding individuals and their remarkable gifts.

Raised under the racial segregation that kept her family's southern country hotel afloat, Norma Watkins grows up listening at doors, trying to penetrate the secrets and silences of the black help and of her parents' marriage. Groomed to be an ornament to white patriarchy, she sees herself failing at the ideal of becoming a southern lady. The Last Resort, her compelling memoir, begins in childhood at Allison's Wells, a popular Mississippi spa for proper white people, run by her aunt. Life at the rambling hotel seems like paradise. Yet young Norma wonders at a caste system that has colored people cooking every meal while forbidding their sitting with whites to eat. Once integration is court-mandated, her beloved father becomes a stalwart captain in defense of Jim Crow as a counselor to fiery, segregationist Governor Ross Barnett. His daughter flounders, looking for escape. A fine house, wonderful children, and a successful husband do not compensate for the shock of Mississippi's brutal response to change, daily made manifest by the men in her home. A sexually bleak marriage only emphasizes a growing emotional emptiness. When a civil rights lawyer offers love and escape, does a good southern lady dare leave her home state and closed society behind? With humor and heartbreak, The Last Resort conveys at once the idyllic charm and the impossible compromises of a lost way of life.

Set in 1933 Mississippi, this thought-provoking story about a young boy who lives in an environment of racial hatred will challenge young readers to question their own assumptions and confront personal decisions. Full color.

Mississippi Sissy is the stunning memoir from Kevin Sessums, a celebrity journalist who grew up scaring other children, hiding terrible secrets, pretending to be Arlene Frances and running wild in the South. As he grew up in Forest, Mississippi, befriended by the family maid, Mattie May, he became a young man who turned the word "sissy" on its head, just as his mother taught him. In Jackson, he is befriended by Eudora Welty and journalist Frank Hains, but when Hains is brutally murdered in his antebellum mansion, Kevin's long road north towards celebrity begins. In his memoir, Kevin Sessums brings to life the pungent American south of the 1960s and the world of the strange little boy who grew there. "Kevin Sessums is some sort of cockeyed national treasure.” —Michael Cunningham

Fiction recounting the experience of growing up in the Deep South

Charming stories of small town life in Winona, Minnesota, in the 1950s.