Remembering a very powerful civil rights hero most Individuals have by no means heard of | Commentary

Robert Parris Moses, who passed away this week at the age of 86, is the foremost civil rights activist most Americans have never heard of. He died on the 80th birthday of Emmett Till, the black boy lynched in 1955, whose funeral in an open coffin displayed the violence that made Jim Crow Mississippi nationwide.

Moses avoided the limelight all his life, but it came nonetheless at times during the first half of the 1960s. As the architect of the 1964 Freedom Summer, Moses embodied one of the most hopeful and enduring slogans of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC): “Come on, let’s build a new world together.” because he did not consciously seek the limelight, the legacy of this giant was and is everywhere.

Moses represents the best of a generation of radical democratic activists whose efforts have helped transform American society in ways that are still controversial and unfolding. Its story, full of twists and turns, reflects the ongoing struggle for multiracial democracy in a nation founded under racial slavery.

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris paid tribute to Moses’ heroic activism. And for a good reason. Bob Moses got into social justice activism early and stayed long.

The unlikely icon changes Mississippi

Moses is a graduate of the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in Harlem, graduated from Hamilton College and received his PhD from the college. in philosophy from Harvard University before dropping out of college after his mother’s untimely death to take care of his emotionally devastated father. In 1960, when the sit-in movement began, Moses quit his job as a math teacher at Horace Mann High School in New York City to join the movement. His initial ambition to work for Dr. Working on Martin Luther King Jr., by chance, turned into a quick friendship with Ella Baker, the veteran organizer who started SNCC.

Moses would become the main organizer of SNCC in Mississippi. With his horn-rimmed glasses, his baby face and his denim overalls, Moses became an unusual icon; the further he moved from the trappings of celebrity, ego, and fame, the more followers he attracted. The mathematician in Moses viewed democracy as a test that required political experimentation, strategic flexibility, and the ability to use grassroots ambitions in the service of national change. The philosopher in him proved capable of inspiring colleagues who ranged from future black power leader Stokely Carmichael to student activist (later documentary filmmaker) Judy Richardson.

In the cities of Mississippi, Bob Moses led the first of the SNCC’s many voting rights projects and sparked much of the dynamic that defined civil rights work in the 1960s. In particular, Moses’ stay in McComb, Pike County in 1961 sparked political shock waves that changed America. In the face of segregation, black poverty, and Jim Crow, Moses watched white hegemony in the rough. Black residents brave enough to support his electoral efforts suffered violence, and he himself was arrested and assaulted. In a letter from prison, Moses described Mississippi as “the middle of the iceberg” of the racial hatred to which he devoted his entire life.

Freedom Summer, three years later, represented Moses’ most daring endeavor in the civil rights era. He proposed, against objections from supporters and critics, a two-month testing ground for American democracy in Magnolia State. Recruiting over a thousand mostly white volunteers destined to interact with overwhelmingly poor, black, and rural communities where suffrage had ceased to exist after rebuilding. Moses had the ability to inspire local blacks, white volunteers, and black students eager to serve a cause they all immediately recognized as greater than themselves. Both groups of black and white volunteers and black residents were supported by the Mississippi law enforcement and white vigilante groups threatened, in many cases difficult to distinguish from one another.

The Mississippi murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner (two white volunteers and one black) made national headlines that summer; Their bodies were recovered from an earth dam in August and body parts of black dead bodies were found previously while searching for them in local rivers. Despite this and other brutal acts of violence, the Freedom Summer went ahead, with volunteers organizing freedom schools, civics classes, libraries, mass gatherings, and cultural and art events in parts of the state where blacks had long been denied citizenship. Also in 1964, after blacks were expelled from the all-white Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention, Moses helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and was part of an effort with Vice President candidate Hubert Humphrey to get their delegation recognized .

The enduring influence of Freedom Summer

The influence of Freedom Summer – and that of Moses – continued through the 1960s and beyond. White participants, like Mario Savio, organized social justice movements like the Berkeley Free Speech Movement on college campuses, which reinforced the work already being done by black activists. Moses’ efforts catalyzed anti-war and anti-imperialism activism inside and outside of SNCC and the Black Freedom Movement. Moses condemned America’s indiscriminate use of violence at home and abroad in the name of freedom and democracy. He linked anti-black violence, poverty and segregation at home with America’s imperial dreams abroad. Years before Martin Luther King Jr. took a firm stance against the Vietnam War, Moses plaintively asked a journalist, “What do you do when the whole country is sick?”

He answered his own question through action. He viewed the brutality of white supremacy in the South not as a regional deviation, but as a mirror of the national soul of America.

Bob Moses did not escape the tumult of the 1960s unscathed. Moses struggled through depression and defeat, but with every step renewed his political belief in radical social change. He changed his name to Bob Parris (his middle name) for a while, and in 1965 at an SNCC conference in Atlanta held at Gammon Theological Seminary, he announced to astonished colleagues, “I will no longer speak to whites.” In 1966 he left America for Tanzania, where he spent a decade teaching math.

Upon returning to the United States, he founded The Algebra Project, which aimed to provide high quality math education to mostly black public school children who faced myriad challenges even after Moses’ civil rights victories. He compared the lack of math classes to the voter registration movements of the 1960s.

As a recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Fellowship,” Moses also generously spent time telling younger generations of scholars and writers (including this one) about his days of the movement who sought to capture the spirit of the times from a figure, its more analytical one , rising wits into the struggles of black everyday. I spoke to him over the phone while researching a biography of Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and found him patient, empathetic, and empathetic. He answered questions he had no doubt heard before, as if they were insightful and fresh.

Moses should be remembered as a patriot who endeavored to register black people in places where they lived under a feudal system of racial oppression: small towns run by white families whose legacies could be traced back to pre-war America where violence against blacks was normalized as usual, even banal. He confronted and fought against it and realized that changing these circumstances required more than law and statute reform, although these were important parts. Hearts and minds needed healing – but he knew that even that was not enough.

We haven’t achieved “enough” yet. As the SNCC leader, antiwar activist, math teacher, husband, father, and citizen, Moses put the United States on a better course; we owe him immeasurable gratitude that can only be repaid by taking action in our own lives to continue his work.

Peniel E. Joseph is the Barbara Jordan Chair of Ethics and Political Values ​​and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also Professor of History. CNN