The civil rights leader who turned to math education

1935–2021

Bob Moses was in many ways an unlikely civil rights hero. Soft-spoken and self-effacing, he offered no soaring oratory and had little taste for confrontation. But Moses was a key figure in the 1960s movement, a field director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who registered thousands of Black voters and trained junior organizers across Mississippi. He was a driving force behind the 1964 Freedom Summer, in which hundreds of northern college students came to Mississippi to work in AfricanAmerican voter registration drives. Repeatedly threatened, beaten, and jailed, Moses had a remarkable ability to stay calm amid violence. In later years, he founded the Algebra Project, a program designed to promote math literacy among disadvantaged students. “Just as Black people in Mississippi saw the vote as a tool to elevate them into the first class politically,” he said, “math is the tool to elevate the young into the first class economically.”

Bob Moses

Moses was born to a janitor father and a homemaker mother in Harlem two months after a race riot “left three dead and injured 60 in the neighborhood,” said the Associated Press. He attended Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School for gifted children and won a scholarship to Hamilton College, a small and almost all-white liberal arts school in upstate New York. There he “found kinship with Quaker friends,” said The Washington Post, and “submerged himself in the writings of Albert Camus.” Moses obtained a master’s degree in philosophy from Harvard and was studying for his doctorate when his mother died. He returned to New York to help his father and took a job teaching math at a prestigious prep school.

As the civil rights movement “gained momentum,” Moses was “mesmerized” by images of sit-ins and protests. “These were kids my age,” he said, “and I knew this had something to do with my own life.” Arriving in Mississippi in 1960, he “quickly became a legend among civil rights organizers,” said The

New York Times. Once when he brought some

Black farmers to a courthouse to register to vote, a man smashed his head with a knife handle, opening a deep gash. A bleeding Moses “staggered up the steps” to finish his task before being driven off to get stitched up. After Blacks were excluded from the Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention in 1964, he helped create the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, “which sought recognition as the state’s delegation instead.” When top Democrats failed to support the effort, a disillusioned Moses vowed to “have nothing to do with the political system any longer.” He turned his focus toward protesting the Vietnam War, and shortly after was alerted that his draft number had been called.

“Denied conscientious objector status,” he moved to Canada and then Tanzania, where he taught math, said CNN.com. Moses returned to the U.S. in 1976 under an amnesty program and in 1982 received a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, which he used to create the Algebra Project. The program has since served more than 40,000 students nationwide. Moses called it his “second chapter in civil rights work,” likening Blacks locked out of the information economy to the sharecroppers of the 1960s. “The question we asked then was ‘What are the skills people have to master to open the doors to citizenship?’” he said. “Now math literacy holds the key.”