Pay attention Again To A 1993 Interview With The Late Civil Rights Pioneer Bob Moses : NPR

By Jason Wilson Last updated Jul 31, 2021

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. We remember one of the pioneers of the civil rights movement, Bob Moses. He died on Sunday at the age of 86. The soft-speaking, low-key activist helped organize and register efforts in Mississippi to register rural black residents for the election. In 1960, after seeing news of sit-ins during lunch in the south, he quit his job as a math teacher in New York City to help out with the civil rights movement.

When he arrived in Mississippi, he was one of the few activists there. He joined the staff of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And in 1964 he helped organize Freedom Summer, which recruited college students – mostly white students from the north – who came to Mississippi to help in efforts to register African Americans to vote and the country to the deeply rooted white Draw attention to Mississippi supremacy. Here he is at a press conference announcing the program.

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BOB MOSES: We hope to send more than 1,000 teachers, ministers, lawyers, and students from across the country to Mississippi this summer to participate in so-called freedom schools, community center programs, voter registration activities, research, and work in the white communities and in general Program to open Mississippi to the country.

BIANCULLI: Bob Moses and others have faced brutal violence, relentless intimidation and death threats. Three of the young activists – Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman – were murdered by white racists. Later in his career, Moses, who had a Masters degree in Philosophy from Harvard, founded the Algebra Project to teach math skills to urban and rural communities. He saw it as an extension of his civil rights work. Terry spoke to Bob Moses in 1993.

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TERRY GROSS: How important was voting when you started in Mississippi? Has there already been a popular movement to …

MOSE: There wasn’t, no. What happened in Mississippi in the 1950s was really heavy repression. Mississippi was South Africa, so to speak. And after the decision of the Supreme Court, the government of the state was really taken over by the racist organizations. So the White Citizens’ Councils, who were the respectable face of the clan, really took over the state government. Ross Barnett was the governor. And he was really the tool of those groups. So they had a really state-organized repression. And they really murdered the NAACP leadership the best they could. When we got there in 1960, ’61, there were only a handful of guides left. Medgar Evers was the state representative of the NAACP. And he ran a kind of one-man shop there with a few guides who were all over the state. And they struggled to hold on.

GROSS: Which Supreme Court decision did you refer to?

MOSES: 1954, Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools. So – you see; Mississippi has just decided that they won’t incorporate the schools here. And the one – the people who might try is the NAACP leadership with legal proceedings. So they started killing part of that leadership. It was in Belzoni, and Gus Courts there, too, in Belzoni. There were quite a number of them that went under in the 1950s.

GROSS: So you operated in a climate of repression, intimidation and violence.

MOSES: Right. Right.

GROSS: What would you use – what would you do to convince people that it was worth the risk to register?

MOSES: Well, I think people had their backs against the wall. So there was a consensus that we should all try to register. And then not that we all – well, that it should be done. And then the question was, who are the people willing to get off? One of the things now was that we accompanied her to the registration office. In the areas where the people down there felt more comfortable when we went with them, we did it. And that is – the registration office became the scene of small battles. In Walthall County, the sheriff hit John Hardy with the gun when he was bringing in some people.

GROSS: What were the typical obstacles you encountered when you accompanied people to the registration and came to the registry office?

MOSES: Well, the delay tactic. So they took one person each. And you know, they’d just pull it out. And then people had to fill out and interpret a section of the constitution. So they gave them some very difficult passages to read and write. And so – and then there was some intimidation. Usually you have police officers and street cops walking in and out. And so it was often kind of an intimidating atmosphere. Then normal citizens would come too. And sometimes they would talk to people to intimidate them.

GROSS: What would you do to make it clear that you cannot be intimidated, especially when people are trying to intimidate others through …

MOSES: Well, mostly we just kept coming back.

GROSS: Yes. Right. Right.

MOSES: I mean that – I mean that was the bottom line, that is, OK whatever you do. You know we – you knock us down. And we get up again. And we come back. So that was basically it.

GROSS: You were certainly more educated than the authorities who stood in your way in Mississippi. Have you ever used that as ID to intimidate them?

MOSES: Of course I didn’t talk much. And that’s one of the problems, you know, because one of the first things is letting you know not to talk, right? And I didn’t really push that. And, I think you are dealing with real personality dimensions here because I just – in my own way of reacting, tended to go into myself and find some kind of core within myself that I then tried to project.

GROSS: Something like this is sometimes interpreted as a sign of weakness.

MOSES: I don’t know. It depends, I guess. There’s a way to project how you feel about trusting the silence you know so you don’t get shaken.

GROSS: But you said it wasn’t about talking. Why?

MOSES: Well, you – because, the talking – the first thing you talk about is whether you will say, sir.

GROSS: Oh, yes.

MOSES: So this is the first line of battle. So as soon as you open your mouth they’ll want to say, sir, you know? What did you say? Did you know – you know they want you to say sir to them. You hardly get into a conversation that way.

GROSS: Were there any tremendous brave deeds in Mississippi that you witnessed?

MOSES: Yes, I think there have been a lot of courageous acts. And some of them were small in some ways. When we were in prison in McComb, there was a group of women who went out of their way to deliver food to us every day. You cooked and delivered it yourself. And about 16 of us there in jail. And of course they were branded in the process, right? So – and later one of them had her house bombed. So many things like that happened.

And then of course there – people were murdered. Louis Allen witnessed a murder. And Herbert Lee, one of the farmers who worked for us, was shot ginning cotton there in Liberty, in the same spot where I was beaten. And Louis Allen saw it. And so the question of the testimony before the justice of the peace, the jury who gathered you there, and the testimony before the federal government – and the Ministry of Justice says: Well, we cannot offer you any protection. And that’s why he suffered – you know, he broke his jaw on one of the cops down there. They put him in and out of prison for a couple of years. And finally they killed him. One day they drove into his front yard and just chased him away.

And he lived pretty much alone for over a couple of years, because Herbert Lee was killed in ’61 and Louis Allen was shot down in early ’64. And it was really his death that really brought the Mississippi Freedom Summer around the corner. It’s like we’ve closed. And we weren’t able to respond to the Herbert Lee murder, but we were able to do something when Louis Allen was gunned down.

GROSS: When people were murdered in Mississippi, people in the civil rights movement from Mississippi or people from outside who worked there like Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, was that a personal crisis for you too?

MOSES: Yes. And Herbert Lee was the first person we worked very closely with who was murdered. And that was the first summer we went down. And I think the only way we could get through this was to say, well, we’re going to live our lives and go through the same kind of danger that led to his murder. And so we don’t ask others to do what we don’t do every day. And that’s how I got through from my point of view.

BIANCULLI: Bob Moses spoke to Terry Gross in 1993. The pioneer civil rights activist died last Sunday at the age of 86. Kevin Whitehead reviews two new solo albums by two tenor saxophonists recorded during the COVID quarantine. This is FRESH AIR.

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