Robert Parris Moses, a US civil rights activist who was shot at and endured beatings and jail while leading black voter registration drives in the American South during the 1960s and later helped improve minority education in math, has died. He was 86.
Moses, who was widely called Bob, worked to dismantle segregation as the Mississippi field director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) 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 Moses developed to help struggling students succeed in math.
Photo: AP
Ben Moynihan, the director of operations for the Algebra Project, said that Moses’ wife, Janet Moses, told him her husband passed away on Sunday morning in Hollywood, Florida.
Information was not given as to the cause of death.
“Bob Moses was a hero of mine. His quiet confidence helped shape the civil rights movement, and he inspired generations of young people looking to make a difference,” former US president Barack Obama wrote on Twitter.
Robert Moses did not 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 Reverend 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 SNCC.
“I was taught about the denial of the right to vote behind the Iron Curtain in Europe,” Robert 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 black people 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 Robert Moses to the county line so that he could leave.
In 1963, he and two other activists — James Travis and Randolph Blackwell — were driving in Greenwood, Mississippi, when someone opened fire on them and the 20-year-old Travis was hit.
A reoccurring theme in Moses’ life and work was the need to listen and work with the local populations where activists were trying to effect change.
In an interview with the National Visionary Leadership Project, he talked about the need for civil rights workers to earn the trust of the local population in Mississippi.
“You had to earn the right for the black population in Mississippi to decide that they were going to work with you, because why should they risk everything to work with you if you were somebody or a collection of people who were just not serious?” he said.
He later helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which sought to challenge the all-white Democratic delegation from Mississippi in 1964.
However, then-US president Lyndon Johnson prevented the group of rebel Democrats from voting in the convention, drawing national attention.
Moses worked as a teacher in Tanzania, Africa, returned to Harvard to earn a doctorate in philosophy and taught high-school math.
Moynihan said Moses saw the work of improving mathematics literacy as an extension of the civil rights work he had started in the 1960s.
“Bob really saw the issue of giving hope to young people through access to mathematics literacy ... as a citizenship issue, as critical as the right to vote has been,” Moynihan said.
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