A Place of Worship, History and Water Baptism
By Roscoe Barnes III
Chairman, Anne Moody
History Project
Copyright © 2017
#AnneMoody
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Civil Rights pioneer Anne Moody attended this church while growing
up in Centreville, Miss.
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Earlier this week, just one
day after Christmas, I took a drive to see Mt. Pleasant Missionary Baptist
Church in southwest Mississippi. It is a place I had to see. After all, it is the church that Anne Moody attended and
the one where she was baptized. It’s also the one featured in her book, Coming
of Age in Mississippi (1968). Several people from the church are mentioned in
the book, including the Reverend Tyson, Reverend Cason, and Sister Jones. The church has a significant place in the narrative of Moody's life story. Below are a few excerpts from her book.
“Shortly
after we moved in I turned five years old and Mama started me at Mount Pleasant
School. Now I had to walk four miles each day up and down that long rock road.
Mount Pleasant was a big white stone church, the biggest Baptist church in the
area.
The
school was a little one-room rotten wood building located right next to it.
There were about fifteen of us who went there. We sat on big wooden benches
just like the ones in the church, pulled up close to the heater. But we were
cold all day. That little rotten building had big cracks in it, and the heater
was just too small.” -- Chapter 1, Coming
of Age in Mississippi
“Even
though Mama stopped going to Mount Pleasant when we moved from the country, she
continued to pay her membership dues.”
“At
Mount Pleasant the men sang through their noses, and here [Centreville Baptist]
the deacons were doing the same thing, singing through their noses and
hollering and going on. At Mount Pleasant I had even seen men cry in church
like women, when they finished praying. At least these men weren’t crying, I
thought, but they were hollering just the same. And just like at Mount
Pleasant, I couldn’t understand one word of any song. All the old ladies did, though.
They were humming right along with them.” – Chapter 5, Coming of Age in
Mississippi
Both of Moody’s parents,
Elmira “Too Sweet” Jefferson and Fred Moody Sr., are buried in the cemetery
located across a gravel road in front of the church. Her mother died on July
27, 1976, and her father died on May 14, 1980.
The original church building has been torn down
and replaced with the current brick structure. It sits on a small hill off of
Highway 24 in Wilkinson County. It’s only a few miles east of Woodville. At one time, the old school house that Moody attended as a child was located near the church, but it too has been demolished.
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This marker at the front of Mt. Pleasant Missionary Baptist Church lists
several names that are featured in Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968).
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Attached to the outside front
structure of the building is a concrete history marker that gives a short
overview of the church’s history. Readers of Moody’s book will instantly
recognize several names on the marker that are mentioned in the book.
Reverend Cason
“Reverend Cason, the minister of the church, taught us in
school. He was a tall yellow man with horn-rimmed glasses that sat on the edge
of his big nose. He had the largest feet I had ever seen. He was so big, he
towered over us in the little classroom like a giant. In church he preached
loud and in school he talked loud.” – Chapter 1, Coming of Age in Mississippi
Reverend Tyson
“The new minister, Reverend Tyson, was short, dark, and
soft-spoken, just the opposite of Reverend Cason. He gave a brief sermon and
then talked about revival which would be starting in a week. The look Mama gave
me when he mentioned ‘revival’ made me suspicious of why she came back to
church the month before baptism.” – Chapter 5, Coming of Age in Mississippi
The current pastor of the
church is the Reverend L.C. Weatherspoon Sr. His assistant pastor is the Rev.
LeReginald Jones, the great-grandson of Edna Jones, who is known as “Sister
Jones” in the book. Sister Jones is mentioned in the section that covers Moody’s
baptism.
Sister Jones
“Usually
during revival season older sisters of the church recruited candidates for
baptism and Sister Jones always outdid the others. During revival she went from
house to house, hopping on her stick, trying to get members with un-baptized
teen-agers to have them join the church. A lot of parents got their children to
join by telling them that Sister Jones would put the ‘bad mouth’ on them if
they didn’t. Now there was Mama nodding her head to everything Sister Jones was
saying.” – Chapter 5, Coming of Age in Mississippi
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Mt. Pleasant Missionary Baptist Church is located off of Highway 24 in
Centreville, Miss. It is nine miles east of Woodville in southwest Mississippi.
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Learn MORE about Anne Moody! Visit here to see
the timeline of important events in her life history!
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For more
information:
See the Anne Moody
page here.
