All three students were severely beaten, and Norman was arrested.

Although the waitress refused to serve them, the students remained in their seats, even as a crowd formed and became hostile. On May 28, 1963, three students from Tougaloo, Anne Moody, Memphis Norman, and Pearlena Lewis, sat down at the Woolworth’s segregated lunch counter in Jackson. In 1963, the Jackson Movement was attempting to desegregate downtown facilities and obtain employment opportunities for African Americans. After her roommate invited her to an NAACP Youth Council meeting, Moody became increasingly involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Two years later, she transferred to Tougaloo College. When she graduated from Johnson High School in 1959, Moody received a basketball scholarship to Natchez Junior College. After Elmira and Fred divorced, Anne took part-time domestic jobs to help her mother financially. She later discovered that her name had been recorded as Annie on her birth certificate, and she began to use that name instead. Her parents, Elmira Williams and Fred Moody Sr., who were sharecroppers, named her Essie Mae. In the early 1960s, while a student at Tougaloo College, she worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).Īnne Moody was born on September 15, 1940, in Centreville, Mississippi. Anne Moody was a writer and civil rights activist best known for her memoir, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968).

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