4. We had “dreamers” instead of leaders leading us.
This is the conclusion Anne reaches in Chapter 24, while listening to
the speeches given by the leaders of the civil rights movement at the famous
March on Washington, particularly Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I Have a
Dream” speech. After attending the March on Washington, Anne’s uncertainty
about the movement is increased. She had already felt that the leaders of
the movement were out of touch with the base, as evidenced by their emphasis
on voting rights for the poor rural blacks in Mississippi rather than
poverty relief. At the time Moody wrote Coming of Age, King
was still alive, and so this statement was probably in part intended to
affect the ongoing debate. Ironically, at around the time the book was going
to print, King was in fact pushing for a change in direction in the movement
to focus more on bread-and-butter issues. He was shot while rallying
striking workers in Memphis. It was 1968, the same year Coming of
Age was published.
