“Just do your work like you don’t know nothing.” Burke’s that evening, mama’s words kept running through my mind. Just do your work like you don’t know nothing . . .” And don’t you let on like you know nothing about that boy being killed . . . These white folks git a hold of it they gonna be in trouble . . . “Eddie them better watch how they go around here talking. “. . . I heard Eddie them talking about it this evening coming from school.” “Where did you hear that?” she said angrily. “Mama, did you hear about that fourteen-year-old Negro boy who was killed a little over a week ago by some white men?” I asked her. I was now working for one of the meanest white women in town, and a week before school started Emmett Till was killed . . . In her memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi, she recalls her attempts to make sense of Till’s murder and the responses to her questions from the adults in her life. As a student at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, Moody engaged in grassroots civil rights activism, participating in lunch counter sit-ins and voter registration drives. 1940), born Essie Mae Moody, grew up in Centreville, Mississippi, and was 14 years old when she learned about the murder of Emmett Till.
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