Bob Moses, 1960s civil rights leader, dies at 86
Bob Moses, a towering but self-effacing leader of the civil rights movement who, after enduring beatings and jailings to register Black voters in Mississippi in the 1960s, picked up the civil rights torch 20 years later by founding the Algebra Project, a math education initiative aimed at rural and inner-city students, died July 25 at his home in Hollywood, Fla. He was 86.
Ben Moynihan, the director of operations for the Algebra Project, confirmed the death to the Associated Press.
Bespectacled, owlish and bearing a master’s degree in philosophy from Harvard, Moses was an unlikely frontline activist - much less an obvious candidate to quit his comfortable prep-school teaching job in the Bronx in 1960 and immerse himself in the most violently segregationist precincts of Mississippi. A janitor’s son raised in New York public housing, he showed precocious talent for academic fields involving logic, especially mathematics and philosophy. He found kinship with Quaker friends in college, and he submerged himself in the writings of Albert Camus, the French-algerian Nobel laureate whose books explored universal questions of human existence and justice.
As the civil rights movement gained momentum, Moses felt at a certain intellectual remove. “Words are more powerful than munitions,” his early intellectual lodestar, Camus, once wrote. But a turning point for the 25-year-old Moses was reading news accounts of the nascent sit-in protests in the South. He studied the newspaper dispatches for weeks, mesmerized and finally ready to engage.
“Before, the Negro in the South had always looked on the defensive, cringing,” he once said. “This time they were taking the initiative. They were kids my age, and I knew this had something to do with my own life.”
Mentored by civil rights veterans Bayard Rustin and Ella Baker, he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, sidestepped the sit-ins and initiated voter-registration drives instead as a more direct way to gain political power for Blacks.