One afternoon in June 1964, African American civil rights activist Bob Moses was teaching a group of white students how to survive as voter registration activists in the viciously hostile atmosphere of Mississippi when he received a phone call. Three of his crew had disappeared. Moses feared the worst, and he was right.
James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered by police officers under the guise of the Ku Klux Klan, a circumstance that later became the subject of the 1988 film Mississippi Burning. Her disappearance threw Moses, who had long been committed to fighting for African American suffrage in Mississippi, into the civil rights limelight.
Moses, who died at the age of 86, was one of the main characters in the 1960s African American renaissance. He was less rhetorically inspired than Martin Luther King, less bold than Malcolm X, but arguably no less important in his impact and role model, since he combined serious intellectual rigor with courageous and humane political activism. Shot at, beaten, and often jailed, he led the campaign that enabled Mississippi blacks to vote with unwavering but quiet courage.
While African Americans had full legal and theoretical voting rights, the southern states, including Mississippi, did everything they could to prevent them from voting or even registering to vote. While the Summer Freedom Vote Registration initiatives did not immediately produce the breakthrough that allowed most African Americans to vote, they did have a significant moral impact.
But disenchanted with what he saw as the lukewarm commitment of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to the civil rights matter, Moses later withdrew from the struggle for seven years to teach at a rural school in Tanzania. He returned to do a PhD in mathematical philosophy at Harvard and then developed a concept of profound originality, the Algebra Project, which used mathematics to empower young people who were disadvantaged due to their lack of verbal confidence.
Moses was born in Harlem, New York into a family he said “came into the world”. His paternal grandfather was an eminent Baptist pastor, an uncle was a professor, and a cousin was an architect. But Bob’s father, Gregory Moses, worked as a janitor during the Depression and eventually became an alcoholic, so his mother Louise (nee Parris) picked up the pieces.
Bob attended Stuyvesant High School and received a scholarship to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, a small institution that was conservative in many ways but racially liberal. There he learned about the writings of Albert Camus: A dog-eared copy of the rebel stayed with him during dangerous times in Mississippi. He was also influenced by the Quakers and went to Belgium, France, Germany, and Japan with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that promotes peace.
In Hamilton he did well enough to be accepted as a student at Harvard, where he took a course in mathematical logic with the great philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine in 1957. However, in 1958 he had to drop out when his mother died and his father had a breakdown. He briefly taught math at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx. Then he visited a cousin in Virginia, witnessed a sit-in, and decided to devote his life to the African American cause.
In 1960 he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, known colloquially as Snick, which sent him to Mississippi as the first Secretary of State. Focusing on voting behavior, he argued that no opening, however large, of segregated lunch tables would give Mississippi poor blacks the respect they needed from white politicians.
It was hard, lonely, and dangerous work. According to one source, 63 African Americans were killed in electoral situations in Mississippi in the early 1960s. It wasn’t long before Moses experienced violence too. Machine guns shot at a car he was in. He was badly beaten and had the audacity to sue his suspected attacker, who was acquitted. He was also arrested and detained on several occasions, mostly briefly.
In those early days he was part of a tiny group of African American students trying to encourage black tenants and their wives to vote. It wasn’t until later that thousands of students from Stanford, Yale, and other well-known universities flocked to the state to help.
Bob Moses, center, with fellow activists Hollis Watkins, left, and Lawrence Guyot at the National Student Association conference in Bloomington, Indiana in 1963. Photo: Leni Sinclair / Getty Images
Moses’ Mississippi experience had taught him not to expect much from the federal government, and his disillusionment with white liberals was complemented by his experience at the National Convention of the Democratic Party in Atlantic City in 1964 in attempts to gain greater black representation , essentially by Lyndon Johnson. His public protests at that congress earned him national recognition, but in late 1964 he was deeply discouraged by various events, including the way Snick gave up non-violence under the influence of Stokely Carmichael.
Although Moses was a natural leader, he had actively discouraged the personality cult and in late 1964 had resigned from his position as recognized leader of the Council of Federated Organizations, an umbrella organization of civil rights groups in Mississippi, because “My position there was too strong, too central, so that people … started using me as a crutch ”. He also temporarily stopped using his last name with its Biblical associations and instead adopted his mother’s maiden name.
By this time he had spoken out against the Vietnam War and spoke in April 1965 at the first major anti-Vietnam demonstration at the Washington Monument. Shortly afterwards, when he went to Harvard to do a PhD in philosophy of mathematics, he found that his postponement of military service had been denied; he suspected the FBI was behind the move. So he borrowed money from one of his brothers and went to Canada to avoid being drafted. At this point his first marriage to another activist, Dona Richards, had broken up.
As early as the fall of 1964, Moses was part of a delegation of African-Americans, paid for by the singer Harry Belafonte, who visited Guinea to see how things were going in Africa. After two years in Canada, he moved to Tanzania with his second wife, Janet Jemmott, where he stayed for seven years. He got a job as a math teacher at the Same Boys’ Secondary School near the Kenyan border, not far from Kilimanjaro, Janet also taught English there, and they raised four children: two sons, Tabasuri and Omowale, and two daughters, Maisha and Mailika.
In 1977 they returned to the USA. Bob received his PhD from Harvard and taught math at a high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was Maisha who brought him his next big idea when she complained that she couldn’t study algebra in her high school. Bob volunteered to teach it there.
In 1982 he received a MacArthur Foundation grant that enabled him to start the Algebra Project. The idea was simple, in part, of helping poor people, mostly African American, acquire the algebra skills they would need in many good jobs. But underlying this simple plan was the deeper belief that it would enable poor blacks, who often grew up without books or even newspapers in the house, to gain intellectual trust.
The first two projects were in Cambridge, home of Harvard and MIT, and Jackson, Mississippi, the state with the worst schools for black children in the union. The idea was later expanded to include schools in California, Florida, and elsewhere. It used to be attended by up to 10,000 students a year, and it continues to this day.
He leaves Janet, her four children and seven grandchildren.
Robert Parris Moses, civil rights activist and educator, born January 23, 1935; died July 25, 2021
Godfrey Hodgson died in January
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