[Bob Moses was teaching math at the Horace Mann School in the
Bronx when scenes of Black people sitting at lunch counters across the
South inspired him to become an activist.] [[link removed]]

BOB MOSES, CRUSADER FOR CIVIL RIGHTS AND MATH EDUCATION  
[[link removed]]


 

July 25, 2021
Mississippi Today, NYT, xxxxxx

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ Bob Moses was teaching math at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx
when scenes of Black people sitting at lunch counters across the South
inspired him to become an activist. _

Bob Moses was teaching math at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx
when scenes of Black people sitting at lunch counters across the South
inspired him to become an activist., Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press


 

‘May his light continue to guide us’: Civil rights leader Bob
Moses dies at 86
by Kayleigh Skinner
[[link removed]], Bobby Harrison
[[link removed]]

Mississippi Today [[link removed]]
July 25, 2021

[link removed]
[[link removed]]

Robert "Bob" Parris Moses, a civil rights leader, educational advocate
and pioneer in grassroots community organizing whose efforts played a
key role in helping Black Mississippians gain basic rights, died
Sunday at 86.

On Sunday morning, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) Legacy Project's 60th Anniversary Conference posted on social
media that Moses, a civil rights hero, had died.

"We honor his vision, tenacity, and fearlessness. His deep belief in
people who find themselves in the socio/economic bottom made a
fundamental difference for millions of his fellow Americans," the SNCC
Legacy Project said in a statement.

Moses, a New York native, was a field secretary for SNCC in
Mississippi. He also served as co-director of the Council of Federated
Organizations (COFO), which used community organizing as a tool to
launch voter registration projects across the state.

COFO served as an umbrella for an alliance between the SNCC, the
Congress of Racial Equality and the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and helped focus civil rights
efforts in the state. COFO was known for
[[link removed]]
its young organizers' door-to-door canvassing, voter registration
preparation and workshops, and actual registration attempts in
Mississippi.

Through his work with both of these organizations, Moses was
instrumental in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the 1964 voter
registration drive created to increase the number of registered Black
voters in Mississippi. That summer, white volunteers traveled to the
South to work alongside African Americans who were fighting for access
to the polls.

"At the heart of these efforts was SNCC’s idea that
people—ordinary people long denied this power—could take control
of their lives," the SNCC statement continued. "These were the people
that Bob brought to the table to fight for a seat at it: maids,
sharecroppers, day workers, barbers, beauticians, teachers, preachers
and many others from all walks of life."

Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP and a Mississippian, said
“Bob Moses was a giant, a strategist at the core of the civil rights
movement. Through his life’s work, he bent the arc of the moral
universe toward justice, making our world a better place. He fought
for our right to vote, our most sacred right. He knew that justice,
freedom and democracy were not a state, but an ongoing struggle.

“So may his light continue to guide us as we face another wave of
Jim Crow laws. His example is more important now than ever…Rest in
power Bob.”

In response to the state Democratic Party denying access to Black
Mississippians, Moses, along with Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker and
others created the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The effort
created national attention at the 1964 National Democratic Convention
as conflict developed over whether to recognize the integrated party
or the traditional party. New party members ultimately failed at being
seated as voting members of the 1964 convention, but their efforts
brought new attention to the plight of African Americans in
Mississippi and other Southern states and ultimately led to a
revolution in the national Democratic Party on racial issues.

“He was a civil rights icon who made sacrifices for what he
believed,” said state Rep. Robert Johnson, D-Natchez. “He could
have done a lot of things, but he made sacrifices on behalf of the
movement.”

In addition to his civil rights work, Moses taught math to students in
Tanzania from 1969 to 1976. In 1982, Moses went on to found The
Algebra Project [[link removed]]. The national organization
exists to teach students, especially low income students and students
of color, mathematical literacy and prepare them for college.

In 2000, Moses was honored by both the Mississippi House and Senate,
whose members in past years had passed laws that he fought to overturn
denying voting rights and other basic rights to African Americans.

“One of my greatest honors as a legislator has been to sponsor a
resolution honoring Bob Moses for his work with SNCC and, later, with
the Algebra Project,” said Sen. John Horhn, D-Jackson. “He was a
quiet, meticulous, effective visionary and leader and his
contributions to helping Mississippi free itself from the yoke of
discrimination and tyranny are incalculable.”

State Rep. Alyce Clarke, D-Jackson, was just this past weekend honored
at Jackson State University along with Moses and other civil rights
leaders as being part of a mural titled "Chain Breakers." Clarke was
the first Black woman elected to the Mississippi Legislature. She
began serving in the state House in 1984. Clarke described Moses “as
a brilliant person and somebody who did what he said he was going to
do….It was an honor to be included in a mural with him and other
civil rights leaders.”

Moses also inspired an exhibit in the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum
in downtown Jackson. The museum's fifth gallery, “A Tremor in the
Iceberg,” is inspired by his description of the movement in
Mississippi: “A tremor in the middle of the iceberg from a stone
which the builders rejected.”

“Staff are saddened to hear of the death of Bob Moses, an American
icon who left a tremendous legacy in Mississippi,” said Katie
Blount, executive director of the Mississippi Department of Archives
and History. “We are honored that he was the keynote speaker during
the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Lecture Series in 2014. His commitment to
justice is displayed throughout the Mississippi Civil Rights
Museum.”

This article
[[link removed]]
first appeared on Mississippi Today [[link removed]] and
is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

_KAYLEIGH SKINNER joined the Mississippi Today team in January 2017 as
an education and legislative reporter and advanced to a senior staff
member in her four years with the company. Skinner most recently
served as deputy managing editor before assuming the role of managing
editor. Kayleigh has a bachelor’s in journalism from the School of
Journalism and New Media from the University of Mississippi. Before
joining Mississippi Today, Kayleigh worked at The Hechinger Report,
Chalkbeat Tennessee, and The Commercial Appeal. She has appeared on
MSNBC, NPR, and BBC Newsday Radio to discuss her reporting._

_BOBBY HARRISON, Mississippi Today’s senior capitol reporter, covers
politics, government and the Mississippi State Legislature. He also
writes a weekly news analysis which is co-published in newspapers
statewide. A native of Laurel, Bobby joined our team June 2018 after
working for the North Mississippi Daily Journal in Tupelo since 1984.
He is president of the Mississippi Capitol Press Corps Association and
works with the Mississippi State University Stennis Institute to
organize press luncheons. Bobby has a bachelor's in American Studies
from the University of Southern Mississippi and has received multiple
awards from the Mississippi Press Association, including the Bill
Minor Best Investigative/In-depth Reporting and Best Commentary
Column._

_Support the work of MISSISSIPPI TODAY
[[link removed]*mu2xh6*_ga*YW1wLU9NXy14b2tKNXBIU0xDb05qOHJ5SUE.]
We envision a Mississippi where engaging in the news is a way of life.
We think good reporting and the accountability it inspires can change
the trajectory of our state._

Five of the six civil rights legends, living and dead, that the
Jackson State University's Office of Community Engagement, are honored
with the unveiling of its "Chain Breakers" mural at the COFO building
in Jackson, Miss., Saturday, July 24, 2021. From left they are, civil
rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer; educator and civil rights activist,
Bob Moses; higher education educator Rose Elizabeth Howard Robinson;
the first African American bookstore owner in the Washington Addition
community Louise Marshall, and the first African American florist in
the Washington Addition, Albert Powell. ROGELIO V. SOLIS, AP

Bob Moses, Crusader for Civil Rights and Math Education, Dies at 86

Michael Levenson [[link removed]], Clay
Risen [[link removed]] and Eduardo Medina
[[link removed]]
New York Times
July 25, 2021
[link removed]
[[link removed]]

Bob Moses, a soft-spoken pioneer of the civil rights movement who
faced relentless intimidation and brutal violence to register Black
voters in Mississippi in the 1960s, and who later started a national
organization devoted to teaching math as a means to a more equal
society, died on Sunday at his home in Hollywood, Fla. He was 86.

His daughter Maisha Moses confirmed his death. She did not specify a
cause.

Mr. Moses cut a decidedly different image from other prominent Black
figures in the 1960s, especially those who sought change by working
with the country’s white political establishment.

Typically dressed in denim bib overalls and seemingly more comfortable
around sharecroppers than senators, he insisted that he was an
organizer, not a leader. He said he drew inspiration from an older
generation of civil rights organizers, like Ella Baker
[[link removed]],
a leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and her
“quiet work in out-of-the-way places and the commitment of
organizers digging into local communities.”

“He exemplified putting community interests above ego and personal
interest,” Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., said in
a phone interview. “If you look at his work, he was always pushing
local leadership first.”

In 1960 he left his job as a high school teacher in New York City for
Mississippi, where he organized poor, illiterate and rural Black
residents, and quickly became a legend among civil rights organizers
in a state known for enforcing segregation with cross burnings and
lynchings. Over the next five years, he helped to register thousands
of voters and trained a generation of organizers in makeshift freedom
schools.

White segregationists, including local law enforcement officials,
responded to his efforts with violence. At one point during a
voter-registration drive, a sheriff’s cousin bashed Mr. Moses’
head with a knife handle. Bleeding, he kept going, staggering up the
steps of a courthouse to register a couple of Black farmers. Only then
did he seek medical attention. There was no Black doctor in the
county, Mr. Moses later wrote, so he had to be driven to another town,
where nine stitches were sewn into his head.

* Refer someone to The Times.

They’ll enjoy our special rate of $1 a week.
[[link removed]]

Another time, three Klansmen shot at a car in which Mr. Moses was a
passenger as it drove through Greenwood, Miss., Mr. Moses cradled the
bleeding driver and managed to bring the careening car to a stop.

Arrested and jailed many times, Mr. Moses developed a reputation for
extraordinary calm in the face of horrific violence. Taylor Branch,
the author of “Parting the Waters,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning
account of the early civil rights movement, told The New York Times
[[link removed]] in
1993 that “in Mississippi, Bob Moses was the equivalent of Martin
Luther King.”

Although less well-known than some of his fellow organizers, such as
the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer
[[link removed]] and John
Lewis [[link removed]],
Mr. Moses played a role in many of the turning points in the struggle
for civil rights.

He volunteered for and later joined the staff of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, where he focused on voter
registration drives across Mississippi. He was also a director of the
Council of Federated Organizations, another civil rights group in the
state.

Mr. Moses also helped to start the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer
Project, which recruited college students in the North to join Black
Mississippians in voter registration campaigns across the
state, according to the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education
Institute at Stanford University
[[link removed]].

Their efforts that summer were often met with brutal
resistance. Three activists
[[link removed]] —
James E. Chaney, who was Black, and Andrew Goodman and Michael H.
Schwerner, who were white — were murdered in rural Neshoba County,
Miss., just a few weeks after the campaign began.

That same year, when Black people were excluded from the all-white
Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National Convention in
Atlantic City, N.J., Mr. Moses helped create the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party, which sought recognition as the state’s delegation
instead.

Mr. Moses, King, Hamer and Bayard Rustin
[[link removed]] negotiated
directly with Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota, who was running
for vice president. Although King favored a compromise in which the
Freedom Party delegates would be given two seats alongside the
all-white delegation, Mr. Moses and other Freedom Party leaders held
out for full recognition.

Mr. Moses later recalled that he was in Mr. Humphrey’s suite at the
Pageant Motel when Walter Mondale
[[link removed]],
Minnesota’s attorney general and head of the party’s credentials
committee, suddenly announced on television that the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party had accepted the “compromise.”

“I stomped out of the room, slamming the door in Hubert Humphrey’s
face,” Mr. Moses recalled in the book “Radical Equations: Civil
Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project,” which he wrote with
Charles E. Cobb Jr.

Mr. Moses called the convention a “watershed in the movement”
because it showed that support from the party’s white establishment
was “puddle-deep,” and he despaired over the possibility of
building a biracial coalition that also bridged class divisions.

“You cannot trust the system,” he said in 1965. “I will have
nothing to do with the political system any longer.”

Robert Parris Moses was born on Jan. 23, 1935, in New York City, one
of three children of Gregory H. Moses, a janitor, and Louise (Parris)
Moses, a homemaker.

In a 2014 interview with Julian Bond
[[link removed]], Mr. Moses credited his
parents with fostering his love of learning, recalling that they would
collect books for him every week from the local library in Harlem.

He was raised in the Harlem River Houses, a public housing complex,
and attended Stuyvesant High School, a selective institution with a
strong emphasis on math. He played basketball and majored in
philosophy and French at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y.

He earned a master’s degree in philosophy in 1957 from Harvard
University, and was working toward his doctorate when he was forced to
leave because of the death of his mother and the hospitalization of
his father, according to the King Institute. He moved back to New
York, where he taught math at the private Horace Mann School in the
Riverdale section of the Bronx.

Already active in the local civil rights movement, he left for
Mississippi after seeing scenes in the news of Black people picketing
and sitting at lunch counters across the South. The images “hit me
powerfully, in the soul as well as the brain,” he recalled in
“Radical Equations.”

His natural confidence and calm demeanor drew people to him, and he
soon became something of a civil rights celebrity. He was a hero of
many books on the movement, and an inspiration for the 2000
movie “Freedom Song,”
[[link removed]] starring Danny Glover.

Eventually the fame got to be too much — not only because it added
to the stress of an already overwhelming task, but also because he
thought it was dangerous for the movement. He resigned from the
Council of Federated Organizations in December 1964 and from S.N.C.C.
two months later. He was, he said, “too strong, too central, so that
people who did not need to, began to lean on me, to use me as a
crutch.”

Mr. Moses grew active in the movement against the Vietnam War, and in
April 1965 he spoke at his first antiwar protest, in Washington, D.C.
“The prosecutors of the war,” he said, were “the same people who
refused to protect civil rights in the South” — a charge that drew
criticism from moderates in the civil rights movement and from white
liberals, who worried about alienating President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Not long afterward, he received a notice that his draft number had
been called. Because he was five years past the age limit for the
draft, he suspected it was the work of government agents.

Mr. Moses and his wife, Janet, moved to Tanzania, where they lived in
the 1970s and where three of their four children were born. After
eight years teaching in Africa, Mr. Moses returned to Cambridge,
Mass., to continue working toward a Ph.D. in the philosophy of
mathematics at Harvard.

In addition to his wife and daughter, Mr. Moses is survived by another
daughter, Malaika; his sons Omowale and Tabasuri; and seven
grandchildren.

Bob Moses: Organizer and Civil Rights Pioneer

By Peter Dreier
xxxxxx
July 25, 2021

At a time when voting rights are under assault, it is important to
remember the legacy of Bob Moses, a brilliant community organizer who
died on Saturday at age 86. Moses was a key architect of the movement
to enlist Southern Black workers and sharecroppers to register to
vote, a campaign that eventually pressured Congress to pass the 1965
Voting Rights Act, a momentous victory which the Republican Party has
steadily sought to erode.

Moses attended his first civil rights rally, in Newport News, Virginia
in 1960. The fiery Rev. Wyatt Walker had just delivered a rousing
speech extolling the virtues of Martin Luther King Jr. as the leader
of the civil rights movement. Moses, then twenty-five, made his way to
the front of the crowd. As Taylor Branch reports in Parting the
Waters, Moses asked Walker, “Why do you keep saying one leader?
Don’t you think we need a lot of leaders?”

Moses recalled that after participating in that demonstration, he had
a “feeling of release” after a lifetime of accommodating himself
to constant racial slights. “My whole reaction through life to such
humiliation was to avoid it,” Moses recalled, “keep it down, hold
it in, play it cool.”

Within a year, Moses was working for the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi, devoting himself to
bottom-up leadership, empowering ordinary people, challenging the
top-down style practiced by King and others who emerged from the black
church tradition. Moses saw himself as a catalyst, not a leader. Many
students and Mississippi residents, inspired by Moses’s example,
joined SNCC’s voter registration campaign.

Moses grew up in a Harlem housing project. His father, a post office
worker, instilled in his son a belief in the basic dignity of “the
common person.” The gifted Moses passed a citywide examination to
gain admission to Stuyvesant High School, a prestigious public school
in Manhattan. In 1952 he earned a scholarship to Hamilton College in
upstate New York, where he was one of three black students. There he
was attracted to the writings of French philosopher Albert Camus, who
stressed that individuals should refuse to be victims of circumstance
and instead endeavor to act as agents of change. After his junior and
senior years, Moses worked at summer camps in Europe and Japan
sponsored by the pacifist group American Friends Service Committee.

Moses went to Harvard for graduate school in philosophy. He earned his
master’s degree in 1957 but dropped out of the Ph.D. program after
his mother died and his father suffered a nervous breakdown. He moved
back to New York and found a job teaching math at the Horace Mann
School, an elite private institution.

In 1959 he visited veteran civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin,
hoping to find an outlet for his idealism. Rustin put Moses to work as
a volunteer. While working with Rustin, Moses saw the newspaper
stories about the student sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina in
February 1960. He was impressed by the defiant looks on the faces of
the students, who appeared fearless and unflinching. “They were kids
my age,” he later said, “and I knew this had something to do with
my own life.”

Moses was keen to go to the South, so Rustin introduced him to Ella
Baker, who was running the headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In 1960 Moses moved
to Atlanta, found a room at the YMCA, and reported to the SCLC office.
Baker had allowed the SNCC volunteers to use the SCLC office, and
Moses found the SNCC students more interesting than the SCLC
ministers. Baker taught Moses about organizing, sharing her belief in
the power of ordinary black people to change their lives if they could
gain the self-confidence to do so.

Following the sit-ins, some SNCC leaders wanted to continue the direct
action protest, including the Freedom Rides. But Baker and others
believed that the next stage should be voter registration. To
outsiders, this may have seemed a tamer approach, but in fact it was
fraught with danger.

Mississippi’s constitution included restrictions on voter
registration, measures such as literacy tests and poll taxes. The
tests were administered by white voter registrars, who asked would-be
black voters arbitrary and arcane questions, so that even
well-educated blacks were typically refused registration on literacy
grounds. Most blacks did not bother to try to register. In at least a
dozen Mississippi counties, not a single black citizen was registered
to vote.

If blacks, who represented a majority of adults in many Mississippi
counties, had voted in large numbers, they would have controlled the
schools, the police, the courts, and the other levers of government.
Most whites would have done almost anything—inside and outside the
law—to make sure that did not happen. Over the next four years, the
quiet, philosophical Moses would be shot at, attacked, imprisoned, and
beaten as he led the voter registration fight. His calm and courage
inspired others to take a stand. Tom Hayden, who worked with Moses in
the South, said that Moses’ greatest traits were his humility and
his ability to listen.  
“When people asked him what to do, he asked what they thought. At
mass meetings, he usually sat in the back. In group discussions, he
mostly spoke last.”

Bob Moses speaks to volunteers. Courtesy of Steve Schapiro

“Some say Bob was more a mystic than an organizer,” Hayden
recalled. “If so, he was the most practical mystic I ever met. He
was an organizer of organizers who organized people to free themselves
of organizers.”

Moses used McComb, Mississippi, a town of 13,000 people near the
Louisiana border, as his base, establishing an SNCC office in the
black Masonic Hall. Word soon spread about SNCC’s voter registration
classes, and residents of nearby counties began asking for similar
workshops.

On August 15, 1961, Moses accompanied three prospective voters to the
Amite County Courthouse in Liberty, Mississippi, and stood by as they
filled out forms. Driving back to McComb, he was arrested by police on
a bogus charge. He was convicted, was given a ninety-day suspended
sentence, and spent two days in jail. Moses’s calls to the US
Justice Department to protest this harassment went unanswered. On
August 22, after bringing two other blacks to the Liberty courthouse,
Moses was attacked with a knife handle by Billy Jack Caston, a cousin
of the local sheriff, and was wounded badly enough to need nine
stitches. Moses refused to back down and continued to the courthouse,
covered in blood, where he was promptly arrested and jailed. Moses
then did something almost unheard of: he pressed charges against
Caston. But an all-white jury acquitted him.

Other SNCC staffers and volunteers faced similar violence in
retaliation for their voter registration efforts. Local high school
students responded by stepping up their resistance. After
participating in SNCC’s workshops on nonviolence, they began sitting
in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, tried to register to vote,
marched, and got arrested. In October, after the high school principal
refused to readmit several students involved in the protest, more than
100 of them organized a prayer vigil in front of the city hall. As
police began arresting the high-schoolers and as white thugs began
attacking them, Moses and two other SNCC staffers, Bob Zellner and
Charles McDew, tried to protect the students. Police arrested the
three SNCC workers and sentence them to four months in jail.

SNCC staff and volunteers found it increasingly difficult to persuade
rural Mississippians to register to vote. Blacks in Mississippi knew
that their homes could be burned and that they could be shot and
killed by white segregationists while local law enforcement
officials—some also belonging to the Ku Klux Klan or the White
Citizens Councils—sided with the vigilantes. Between 1961 and 1963,
70,000 Mississippi blacks tried to register. Only 4,700 — 5 percent
of the state’s voting-age blacks —succeeded. In December 1962
Moses told the Voter Education Project, “We are powerless to
register people in significant numbers anywhere in the state.”

John F. Kennedy’s administration told SNCC that it liked its voter
registration efforts, but when SNCC staffers called the U.S. Justice
Department appealing for protection or for prosecution of white
vigilantes and local police, who assaulted and intimidated civil
rights workers, it was to no avail. FBI agents in Mississippi looked
the other way when local cops abused civil rights workers.

During the first half of 1963, it was clear that SNCC’s voter
registration campaign had stalled. In the fall of 1963 and again in
the summer of 1964, SNCC expanded its paid staff and recruited white
college students from prestigious universities to help register black
voters. Their primary task was organizing the Mississippi Freedom
Democratic Party (MFDP). In 1963 they held mock elections that gave
blacks a chance to vote for an integrated slate of candidates.

With the support of Allard Lowenstein, a professor at North Carolina
State University, Moses expanded the program.  In 1964, renamed
Freedom Summer, Lowenstein and Moses recruited over a thousand
volunteers – most of them white college students from prestigious
universities -- to Mississippi. White Mississippians retaliated with
vicious violence. In June 1964 three SNCC volunteers were murdered in
Neshoba County, Mississippi, just as hundreds of new recruits were
being trained at a college in Ohio. On the last night of training,
Moses spoke to the volunteers and urged anyone who might be uncertain
to go home. Only a handful did. 

The Freedom Summer volunteers mobilized blacks to participate in
“freedom schools” (where they discussed black history and current
issues and learned about the Mississippi Constitution so they could
pass the literacy test) and to vote in order to send an integrated
delegation to the Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City, New
Jersey. The murders and the presence of privileged white college
students drew significant media attention to SNCC’s efforts. But
President Lyndon B. Johnson, worried about alienating southern whites
in the November 1964 presidential election, refused to seat the MFDP
delegates instead of the segregated delegation. Johnson offered the
MFDP delegation only token seats in the delegation, which the MFDP
rejected.

At the end of 1964, Moses resigned from SNCC. He left Mississippi
uncertain whether it, or the broader civil rights movement, had made
much of a dent in the state’s white political power structure.

It had. In 1965, the year Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, only
6.7 percent of Mississippi blacks were registered to vote. But four
years later the number had jumped to 66.5 percent. The act, which
outlawed literacy tests and other obstacles to voting, was an
important tool for civil rights activists to challenge other barriers
to black political participation, such as gerrymandering of city
council, state legislature, and congressional districts in order to
dilute black voting strength. By 2000, Mississippi had 897 black
elected officials in local and state offices, plus Congress—the
largest number of any state in the country. (Today, blacks constitute
38% of all voters in Mississippi - the highest of any state in the
country – but the state has not had a Black candidate win statewide
office since Reconstruction).

In 1966 Moses moved to Canada to avoid the draft during the Vietnam
War. In 1969 he moved to Tanzania, where he taught math. After
President Jimmy Carter declared amnesty for draft resisters in 1976,
Moses returned to the United States.

He picked up where he had left off at Harvard, completing his Ph.D.
Then he joined his organizing work with his math expertise. When he
discovered that his daughter’s middle school in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, did not offer algebra, he became a volunteer math
teacher at her school and began to develop techniques for teaching the
subject to low-income students, modeled on SNCC’s freedom schools.

In 1982 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (the MacArthur Genius
Award), which he used to establish the Algebra Project. The project
focuses on bringing high-quality public education to students who live
in poor areas throughout the nation. In 1996, Moses, who viewed math
literacy as a civil rights issues, returned to Mississippi to teach
math at Lanier High School in Jackson, using its classrooms as a
laboratory for developing the project, including mobilizing parents
and the black community to support the students, and training teachers
in its techniques. It takes students with low scores on state math
tests and preparing them for college level math by the end of high
school. Three of Moses’ children joined him as Algebra Project
teachers.

By the 1990s, the Algebra Project’s model had reached 10,000 middle
school students and 300 teachers a year in 28 cities, but its efforts
were partly undermined by President George Bush’s No Child Left
Behind program, which emphasized on teaching to and preparing students
for state tests. With support from the  National Science Foundation,
however, the Algebra Project rebounded and expanded its work. In 2001
he and Charles Cobb coauthored Radical Equations: Civil Rights From
Mississippi to the Algebra Project, in 2001.

Today, several hundred schools around the country use the Algebra
Project’s methods. Moses continued to teach at Lanier High School as
well as at Cornell, Princeton, and NYU, using the same organizing
techniques he developed in Mississippi.
In 1999 Moses came to Occidental College in Los Angeles to receive an
honorary degree and get faculty and students involved in his Algebra
Project. At a packed meeting of about a thousand people, a student
asked him, "What do you think we should do to deal with racism in
America?" Moses replied: "What do YOU think we should do?"

Bob Moses “was larger than life and one of the great exemplars of
our humanity!,” tweet scholar-activist Cornel West. “Let us never
forget him!”

“Bob Moses was a moral visionary,” said Heather Booth, a long-time
organizer and veteran of Freedom Summer. “He inspired and guided so
many of us, based on his belief in local people's ability to change
the world if we organize. Especially now, in the face of a new Jim
Crow attack on our freedoms, we need to commit to carry on the
struggle. We'll never turn back.”

PETER DREIER is the Dr. E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics
at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. He has two
forthcoming books coauthored with Rob Elias: _Baseball Rebels: The
Battles Over Race, Gender and Sexuality That Shook Up the Game and
Changed America_ (University of Nebraska Press, 2022)  and _Major
League Rebels: Baseball Battles Over Worker's Rights and American
Empire_ (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). He is co-editor with Kate
Aronoff and Michael Kazin of _We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism
– American Style_
<[link removed]
[[link removed]]> (The
New Press, 2020) and author of _The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th
Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame
_<[link removed]
[[link removed]]> (Nation
Books, 2012)

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]