Anne Moody's Quest Analysis

A Critique of Anne Moody’s Quest: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Sam cried, in response to his father’s demands, “I’ll die fo I go back into that field! I don’t wanna burn in the sun fo anotha day!” Sam spent day in and day out with his family working in the fields in a desperate attempt to salvage crops for cash. In a family of ten, food was demanded, sought, and earned on a monotonous daily basis and any extra cash was saved to buy clothes for the younger children. Sam, only six years old, faced the same fate that many other black children faced growing up in the brutal South. Black families everywhere experienced tribulations regarding economic stability, shelter, and fear from the overwhelming majority of white
Jim Crow laws were heavily enforced in Mississippi and throughout the deep South – public facilities including transportation, restaurants, water fountains and bathrooms, and especially schools were very segregated. Although Jim Crow laws mandated a “separate but equal” status within these facilities, it was not the case. Black schools did not receive as much money, were not as abundant, and had little to no textbooks. If they did manage to have textbooks they were old, handed-down books from white schools. There was such an insignificant amount of black schools available in Mississippi that when Anne started school she would have to walk miles there and back everyday where she witnessed her classmates get beat for ridiculous accidents. “The school was a little one-room rotten wood building…We were cold all day. That little rotten building had big cracks in it, and the heater was just too small” (14). Similarly, most black schools in the South were rotten and filthy – often having sagging, leaking roofs and windows without glass - and were over-crowded with little desks to compensate the amount of students. In addition to these horrendous conditions of black schools in the South, the teachers were often under-trained and scarce compared to their white
For example, the 1954 ruling of U.S. Supreme Court case Brown V. Board of Education rendered integration of public schools and ended segregation. In 1964, the twenty-fourth amendment was added to the Constitution, which abolished poll taxes. The year after in 1965, the Voting Rights Act banned literacy tests and demanded government officials to oversee voter registration and soon thousands of new blacks were successfully able to vote. Before the Civil Rights Movement, there was a lack of black elected officials and representation in government; however, it did exist. During President Roosevelt’s term in the twentieth century, Roosevelt induced the “Black Cabinet” which was an informal group of African American public policy advisors to offer guidance and represent he needs of blacks across the country. Members did not hold office, but they included community leaders, scholars, and activists, such as Mary McLeod Bethune, that gave blacks a better representation in government. In addition to this, blacks did in fact hold elected office in government, but not in the South. Oscar DePriest was the first African American to be elected to congress post-Reconstruction and was a Republican from Illinois. His election gave hope to blacks regarding their political future and symbolized the regeneration of blacks in politics. His successor, elected in 1934, was Arthur Mitchell who was the