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After the publication of her memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi, civil rights activist Anne Moody was everywhere.

Television shows. Radio. A review in the New York Times by Senator Ted Kennedy. In 1968, the American public was enthralled with her account of growing up as an impoverished Black girl in the Jim Crow-era South, published when she was only 28 years old.

And then she vanished.

������ɫ History Professor Leigh Ann Wheeler has taught Moody’s book for years in her classes and always wondered how Moody’s story evolved after the end of her famous bildungsroman. Now, she’s finishing her own book answering that mystery, with the help of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

The fellowship brings together scholars from around the world to spend a year focusing on their work, while connecting with each other and with Harvard faculty. Wheeler will use that time, which begins in September, to finish a project that she has been working on since 2017.

“I always have a hard time writing during the semester when I’m teaching, because teaching absorbs all of my energy, focus and intellect,” she said. “Also, the part of the book that I’m working on now is especially intense.”

Moody was born in 1940, the daughter of sharecroppers and the descendant of slaves. Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, is where she became involved in activism in the early 1960s, including a protest at a Woolworth’s lunch counter that received national attention. She had left activism by the time she started working on her book.

“She didn’t really want to be famous. She found the attention she was getting to be quite a burden,” Wheeler recounted.

Hounded by the press, Moody fled the United States for Europe, but her strategy backfired after the publication of a German-language edition of her book. Still, she surfaced occasionally; she went on speaking tours in the 1980s, visiting colleges that were using her book in their curricula.

“She was delighted to see that it was still having an impact. She really wanted it to reach white people in particular, and she felt especially rewarded when she received letters from white students who told her how it had changed their views and understanding of race in the U.S.,” Wheeler said. “That was one of her goals.”

But clues as to Moody’s ultimate whereabouts didn’t start trickling out until after her death in 2015.

Wheeler connected with Moody’s large, extended family, who embraced the project. She is deeply committed to the work and aware of the inherent complexities given that she is a white New Yorker writing about a Black woman from the South.

“I’m incredibly grateful and honored,” she said.

Wheeler keeps the family’s wellbeing at the forefront of her mind and makes sure to send along any photos or documents related to Moody’s life. This includes a trove of photos from Moody’s time in Germany, which her Mississippi family had never seen.

At Harvard, she’ll tackle the last several decades of Moody’s life, a difficult period marked by fragile mental health. She has copious sources, including personal records and tens of thousands of pages of Moody’s journals.

“I have stuff that few biographers are lucky enough to have. It’s a great asset for my work, but it’s also overwhelming,” she reflected.

Wheeler hopes that the book will lead to more opportunities to reconsider the impact of racism and honor Moody’s civil rights activism. One of Moody’s alma maters, Natchez Community College in Mississippi, is creating an Anne Moody Interpretative Center that should be completed around the time that Wheeler expects to finish the book.

There’s a moment that stays with Wheeler as she works on her book: When President Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Moody turned to one of her sisters. “This is why we did it,” she said.

“I just love thinking about that moment because it tells me that she didn’t think that what she had suffered for the cause of civil rights was wasted,” Wheeler said.