As remembered by David "Dave"
Dennis
February 5, 2015
I just reived word from Mr. Glen Cotton, that another warrior, Anneie Moody, (field secretary for CORE in the 60's, Tougaloo graduate, who is pictured in the photos at the lunch counter in Jackson in 1963 with Joan Trumpauer, John Salter et al, author of Coming of Age in Mississippi) has joined our Jessie Harris, Jimmie Travis, Vincent Harden, Rudy Lombard, Danny Mitchel, etc. on the the great battle field of the next life.
This has been a tough 6 months for many of us, but I hope a great journey for them.
David Dennis
Director of the Southern Initiative Algebra Project
P.O. Box 50111
As remembered by Jim Marshall
February 6, 2015
When my daughter was studying in high school about the civil rights movement, her class needed to read a book about the movement. I naturally gave her Anne Moody's book Coming of Age in Mississippi: An Autobiography.
Many of us know of Joan Trumpauer Mulholland and her son Loki's film An Ordinary Hero. Lest you forget or you never knew Anne Moody, she sat in with Joan that day in Jackson, Mississippi. She gave her heart to the movement just as so many young Mississippians did and continue to do. They were and still are the building blocks of the Mississippi civil rights movement. These students of Tougaloo learned more than book learning there as they continue to be nurtured and guarded there today.
May her memory be blessed.
Yours,
Jim Marshall
Author of Student Activism and
Civil Rights in Mississippi: Protest Politics and the Struggle for
Racial Justice. With A Foreword by Staughton Lynd
As remembered by Ben Greenberg
February 6, 2015
Dave,
Thanks for sharing the sad news about Anne Moody. I'm the reporter who in recent years has been publishing investigative pieces about the February 28, 1964 murder of Anne Moody's uncle, Clifton Walker near Woodville, Miss. (I introduced myself to you at the 80th birthday celebration for Bob Moses, at MIT.) My condolences to the friends and family of Anne Moody.
From what I've been able to learn, it does not appear that Mr. Walker was murdered in retaliation for Anne's civil rights activities. As best as I can tell, he was murdered because whites saw him as "uppity" and circulated rumors that he had relationships with white women. He was a bold, stylish man, who earned enough at International Paper in Natchez that his wife Ruby did not have to work outside the home for whites; he was known to carry a gun and to stand up to intimidation.
But it is possible that Anne's profile in the civil rights movement could have had something to do with the local perception of him in Wilkinson County. Mr. Walker was much loved by his nieces and nephews — including Anne. She writes poignantly in Coming of Age of Mississippi, about how disturbed she was by the murder, her fears that her uncle was targeted because of her, and that she could not return home for the funeral because her presence in Wilkinson County could cause trouble to her family living there.
The Justice Department re-opened the Clifton Walker case in 2009, as part of its cold case initiative, and closed the case again in 2013, having done little more than comb through the old 1964 FBI and Highway Patrol documents on the murder. Clifton Walker's sister, Emma, was the second wife Anne's father, Fred Moody. It is tragic and very sad to me that Anne Moody died without any closure regarding the highly orchestrated killing of her uncle. Mr. Walker's widow, Ruby, died in 1992 without closure. Anne's cousins, Clifton walker's 4 children, are alive and in their 50s and 60s, still without satisfying answers about what happened.
Sincerely,
Ben Greenberg
BenLog
Cold Case Project
617-440-4635
As remembered by Hunter Bear (John Salter,
Hunter Gray)
February 6, 2015
I and my good spouse, Eldri, knew Anne Moody from the point that we and Anne arrived at Tougaloo Southern Christian College in late summer, 1961, myself as a professor and she as a student. We were in contact with her from about that point until late summer, 1994.
She was a fine student of mine in a number of courses, and became a close friend of Eldri and myself. Passionately committed to social justice, Anne was a strong supporter of our Jackson civil rights movement which began very actively in latter 1962 as the economic boycott of the downtown Jackson area and which feathered out into our massive Jackson Movement in the spring of 1963. Her role in our historic Woolworth Sit-In at Jackson Mississippi on May 28, 1963, is very well known. After the active demonstration phase of the Jackson Movement, she lent her valuable efforts as a CORE representative in other most challenging Magnolia situations.
Her fine writing abilities are very well exemplified in her classic work, Coming of Age in Mississippi, and in a number of other pieces.
In addition to being a very good friend, she was also, as a great many of my students and former students often are, an advisee of mine, and I her advocate, at many points. (From that perspective, I am ethically constrained from discussing any details in any personal challenges she may have faced. I maintain confidences. There is no chronological statute of limitations for me on those.)
But I will broadly mention two matters. If Anne often distrusted some components of government, she was an essentially trusting person when it came to human beings. In almost all of those cases, that trust was eminently justified.
But not all. In 1991, she was significantly enmeshed — through no fault of her own — in a bureaucratic/medical situation in New York City where she resided. She was able to contact me. I extricated her from that mess pronto.
In the earlier part of 1994, and not of her making, "something" tangibly occurred in which she had very good reason to fear for her personal liberty in New York City. A faithful neighbor of hers, an elderly Jewish man, worked with me (I was in North Dakota) to put her on a fast track to our university town of Grand Forks in that rather remote state. For about three months, in the spring of 1994, she and her son, Sasha, lived in a motel quite near our home. We assisted her in a number of ways, as we had on earlier occasions, and continued that for a time into the summer after she and Sasha moved on back East and contact with other writers. Then, we lost touch with her.
Her book, Coming of Age in Mississippi, guarantees her immortality. But more than that, we shall always remember a brave and plucky and committed human being who, despite the many and various vicissitudes, continued toward the Sun.
© Hunter Gray/John R Salter Jr./ Hunter Bear, Pocatello, Idaho, February 6 2015
As remembered by Bob Zellner
February 7, 2015
Dear Dave and all of our precious sisters and brothers,
I got to know Anne Moody when she moved back to New York after many years as an ex-patriot in France. Her American coming of age and journey had been so traumatic that she could barely stand to be in the United Snakes, as Brother Bob Brown would say. My older brother, Jim Zellner, after participating in the early sit-ins in Durham, NC had moved to Germany (of all places) and spent the rest of his live there. So I could commiserate with her desire to shake the dust of this country off her sandals.
Anne was concerned about her son who had grown up in Paris, not experiencing the American racial scene. Maybe she wanted him to know the struggle without knowing the pain. Like Jim Forman and others in our cause at heart, Anne was deeply wounded but struggling on.
Bob Zellner
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