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Activist Robert “Bob” Moses was less well known than Martin Luther King Jr, but the New York math teacher had a lasting impact on the 20th century movement to secure the civil rights of black Americans. He was instrumental in organizing the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, a pivotal campaign that brought nearly 1,000 volunteers to the Deep South State to register blacks for the election.
Although he was attacked and shot at, he saw himself only as a helper for would-be voters. The drive was in line with his philosophy, adopted by senior civil rights activists like Ella Baker, that leaders should avoid the limelight and instead encourage ordinary people to discover their own power.
“It is this problem that Ella identified, helping between people in leadership or being a leader,” he said in a 2014 interview. “There is a difference between ‘Well we are going to plan this action and I will be in front’ and not talking to people to say ‘You have to decide if you go’ to act and if you do we will Be yours. ‘”Moses died on July 25th in Hollywood, Florida. He was 86.
Moses was born on a housing project in Harlem in 1935. He attended an elite high school, received a college scholarship, and later earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Harvard University. He was working on his PhD when his mother’s death and father’s illness forced him to drop out. He became a math teacher at the private Horace Mann School.
In his twenties, he was inspired by the young blacks who protested segregation by sitting at lunch tables for whites only. He volunteered for the movement in Washington, DC, then Atlanta, where King was based. There he met Baker, who suggested he travel to Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi to promote the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In 1961 he returned to Mississippi to focus on voter registration.
The work was dangerous. The SNCC were the civil rights movement raiders who opposed violent supporters of Jim Crow’s segregated social order in their home area. Civil authorities used literacy tests and poll taxes to prevent black citizens from voting, and groups like the Ku Klux Klan used fear and murder to enforce order.
While Moses was trying to support potential voters in 1961, the local sheriff’s cousin in Liberty, Mississippi, hit him on the head with a knife handle. It would take nine stitches later, but he escorted his defendants to the courthouse anyway.
Bob Moses taught an algebra in Jackson, Mississippi in 1990 © Rogelio Solis / AP
For the Freedom Summer 1964, SNCC recruited mostly white college students. Three volunteers, two white and one black, were murdered by the clan before most of the volunteers even made it to the state. Only 9 percent of the 17,000 black Mississippi supporters who attempted to register that summer succeeded in building momentum for the 1965 Suffrage Act. Four years after it was passed, the percentage of black residents in Mississippi who had registered to vote had risen from 7 percent to 67 percent.
“With his horn-rimmed glasses, baby face and denim overalls, Moses became an unusual icon,” wrote Peniel Joseph, professor of public affairs and history at the University of Texas at Austin. “The further he moved from the trappings of celebrity, ego, and fame, the more followers he attracted.”
Moses’ activism went beyond civil rights. He opposed the Vietnam War. When his draft number was dialed – even though he was five years too old to do military service – he and his second wife, Janet Jemmott, moved to Tanzania, where he returned to teaching. After nearly a decade, the couple and their children returned to the United States. Realizing that his daughter’s school did not teach algebra, he began teaching her and several other students. These efforts, along with the MacArthur “Genius” grant awarded to Moses in 1982, resulted in the creation of the Algebra Project, which aims to improve children’s math skills.
Numbers are essential, he argued in Radical Equations, a book he co-authored in 2001, to prepare children for success in a computerized world. “The most pressing social problem affecting poor and colored people today is economic access,” he wrote. “In today’s world, economic access and full citizenship are critically dependent on mathematical and scientific knowledge.”
Math illiteracy hurt racial minorities disproportionately, he added, “which makes them the designated serfs of the information age, just as the people we worked with on plantations in the 1960s were the Mississippi serfs”.
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