Coming of age in Mississippi

In Ann Moody's autobiography, Comming of age in Mississipi she talks about what it was like to grow up in a segregated community. From a young age she saw violence towards black people, her friends from school getting beat up, and people murdered. When she grows up and is in college she becomes part of the NAACP which was an anti-segregation movement. She participated in a sit-in at the Woolworth's lunch counter and just because they were asking to be served on the front counter it caused a huge riot. I thought that this was the most interesting part of the excerpt because it describes her and the people she was at the sit-in with getting hit, being pulled by the hair, having food thrown on them, and all of this as the police watched. They would not go inside and escort them out until the manager asked them to. Their endurance to the torture to prove their point was incredible. That specific point of the story remminded me of when Hayslip was being tortured in My Thi. Although completely different because Hayslip was there against her will and Moody was enduring it because she felt she needed to prove a point, both women never caved in. This got me thinking about human strengh, and almost how mind over matter allows many people to get through tough situations. Hayslip stood for a whole day under the hot sun with ants biting her and although she could have perhaps just given some names to possibly get out of that position, she didnt. At the same time Moody knew that things were wrong the way that they were done, and at her personal expense sat there while the boys tried to put the ropes as noose's around her neck. Both women demostrated such strong self control, Hayslip even says about the ants "i had no one to impress with my self control". Im thinking as a possibility for my 2nd writing assignment to write about the human mental strengh, and compare and contrast Moody and Hayslip's experiences to show examples of this.