Bob Moses performed a important function in civil rights and math literacy for Black college students | Opinion

By Hasan Kwame Jeffries
As the organizer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, Bob Moses traveled to the most dangerous parts of Mississippi to help African Americans end segregation and secure the right to vote. But it wasn’t until 20 years later that he began teaching math at his daughter’s mixed-race middle school in Massachusetts, which led to his life’s work – the Algebra Project.

The Algebra Project is a non-profit organization that aims to help students from historically marginalized communities develop math literacy, the ability of a person to formulate, apply, and interpret math in a variety of contexts. Moses founded it in 1982.

After researching Moses’ role in the civil rights movement for my book – Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt, and later interviewing him for various projects on SNCC, it became clear that The Algebra Project was straight out of his civil rights work in Mississippi. This work helped transform Mississippi from a stronghold of segregation into a focal point of the civil rights revolution.

In his book Radical Equations, Moses recalls being surprised in 1982 to discover that his daughter Maisha, who was in eighth grade in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, would not be teaching algebra because the school did not offer it. Without a knowledge of algebra, she couldn’t qualify for math and science classes in high school.

Math efforts

As explained in his book, Moses had a background in mathematics. In 1957, before joining the civil rights movement, he earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Harvard University and then taught for a few years in the Bronx, New York, at the Horace Mann School, a prestigious private school north of where he is in Harlem grew up. From 1969 to 1976 he taught algebra in Tanzania before returning to the States for a PhD in mathematics.

Moses asked Maisha’s teacher if he could give his daughter additional maths lessons in class, as Maisha refused to get tutoring at home – she refused what she called “two maths”. The teacher agreed, but on the condition that, according to his book, Moses also instructs some of Maisha’s classmates.

Moses agreed. Like the teacher, he believed that all children, including those from historically marginalized communities, deserved a chance to attend advanced math and science in high school.

At the end of the school year, Maisha and the three students who studied with her passed the city-wide algebra exam. According to his book, they were the first in their school to do this.

Enthusiastic about this success, Maisha’s teacher asked Moses to practice his math magic with more students.

But it wasn’t magic.

Moses succeeded in teaching algebra to students, who were often admitted to less rigorous classes and programs, because he believed that black, brown, working class, and poor children could master algebra – or other advanced classes – from a young age.

He also knew that the same students would love to study math when the class was centered on their lived experiences. Red memorizing wouldn’t work; The content had to be assignable.

Moses agreed to teach the arriving eighth graders even though none of his children were in the class. “I thought I had found my job,” he wrote in “Radical Equations”. And his work taught math skills in the emerging digital age.

Math skills for African American children were an essential aspect of Moses’ philosophy and work (Ariel Skelley / DigitalVision via Getty Images).

Key to a better life

Moses believed that math skills were a gateway to equality in a post-industrial society. He stated in 2007: “Algebra is the place in our society where we ask students to master a quantitative literacy requirement. And so algebra is now becoming available as an organizing tool for educational rights and for economic rights. ”In other words, math skills would provide access to computerized careers that would enable African Americans and other historically marginalized youth to assess their living conditions and the social and economic conditions of their communities to improve permanently.

But Moses was not interested in teaching just a few students, any more than he was interested in registering just a few black Mississippians. He wanted to teach as many young people as possible, just as he wanted to organize as many blacks as possible in Mississippi.

Moses believed that math skills were a gateway to equality in a post-industrial society.

However, reaching more young people required a dramatic change in the learning culture at school. Expectations of when young marginalized children should learn algebra had to change, which was no easy task considering that many children shouldn’t learn algebra at all.

Just as he once organized tenants, he began to organize parents.

Emphasis on independence

In the civil rights movement, Moses routinely submitted to the wants and desires of the people he organized, so much so that he left the movement in 1965 when he felt that people turned to him too often for solutions to their problems Find. This was the approach taken by his mentor, veteran activist and SNCC advisor Ella Baker, who led by asking questions rather than providing answers.

Moses spoke to parents at school about the lack of opportunities to learn algebra, which, he recalled, prompted them to initiate a survey which showed that, as explained in his book, “All parents thought their child should do algebra, but not all ”. The parents thought that every child should do algebra. “

Parents were shocked and a little embarrassed about the survey results, which led to a consensus that any seventh or eighth grader can learn algebra.

Just two years after Moses’ daughter passed the citywide exam, King School was offering algebra to seventh and eighth grade students and even Saturday classes for parents.

Today, the Algebra Project is fighting to ensure students get the quality math education they deserve by supporting study cohorts in dozen of schools across the country where students have historically performed poorly in math on state eighth grade exams . The impact of the project at Mansfield Senior High School in Mansfield, Ohio is exemplary. In the eighth grade, the math proficiency of the Algebra Project cohort was 17%. By 10th grade this number had risen to 82%.

Ella Baker liked to say, “Give light and people will find the way.” Few have done better than Bob Moses, who died on July 25, 2021.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries is an associate professor of history at Ohio State University. He wrote this piece for The Conversation, where it first appeared.