Moses, civil-rights activist, founder of math project, dies
Robert Parris Moses, a civil-rights activist who endured beatings and jail while leading Black voter registration drives in the South during the 1960s and later helped improve minority education in math, has died. He was 86.
Moses worked to dismantle segregation as the Mississippi field director of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee during the civil-rights movement and was central to the 1964 Freedom Summer in which hundreds of students went to the South to register voters.
Moses started his “second chapter in civil-rights work” by founding the Algebra Project in 1982 thanks to a MacArthur Fellowship. The project included a curriculum that he developed to help poor students succeed in math.
Ben Moynihan, director of operations for the project, said Moses’ wife, Dr. Janet Moses, told him that her husband died Sunday morning in Hollywood, Fla.
Born and educated in New York, Moses didn’t spend much time in the Deep South until he went on a recruiting trip in 1960 to “see the movement for myself.” He sought out the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta but found little activity in the office and soon turned his attention to the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
“I was taught about the denial of the right to vote behind the Iron Curtain in Europe,” Moses later said. “I never knew that there was [the] denial of the right to vote behind a Cotton Curtain here in the United States.”
The young civil-rights advocate tried to register Blacks to vote in Mississippi’s rural Amite County, where he was beaten and arrested. When he tried to file charges against a white assailant, an all-white jury acquitted the man and a judge provided protection to Moses to the county line so he could leave.
He later helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which sought to challenge the allwhite Democratic delegation from Mississippi. But President Lyndon Johnson prevented the group of rebel Democrats from voting in the convention and instead let Jim Crow southerners remain, drawing national attention.
Disillusioned with white liberal reaction to the civil-rights movement, Moses soon began taking part in demonstrations against the Vietnam War, then cut off all relationships with whites, even former committee members.
He worked as a teacher in Tanzania, Africa, returned to Harvard to earn a doctorate in philosophy and taught high school math in Cambridge, Mass.
Historian Taylor Branch, whose “Parting the Waters” won the Pulitzer Prize, said Moses’ leadership embodied a paradox.
“Aside from having attracted the same sort of adoration among young people in the movement that Martin Luther King did in adults,” Branch said, “Moses represented a separate conception of leadership” as arising from and being carried on by “ordinary people.”