27 July 21
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From the Freedom Summer to the Algebra Project, his was a truly American story.
he life of Bob Moses, who died in Florida over the weekend at 86, was in every sense an American history. In the early 1960s, before all the big speeches and the TV coverage, he left Harvard and a teaching career and moved to Mississippi to register Black voters in some of the most dangerous places in the country. He went there at the urging of another unsung American hero, Ella Baker, and was mentored in the ways of Mississippi by veteran local activist Amzie Moore. In an interview found in Charles Payne's magisterial history of the period, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, Moses recalled meeting Moore in a way that possesses a lot of resonance today.
Somehow, in following [Moore’s] guidance there, we stumbled on the key — the right to vote and the political action that ensued.
From this, in 1964, came Freedom Summer, a sustained act of public courage unsurpassed in American history. Blacks in Mississippi, behind Bob Moses and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, organized to register voters and end the discriminatory tactics that had prevailed throughout the Jim Crow Era. Some 700 volunteers came to Mississippi to help. Two of them were named Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. They were murdered, along with James Chaney, by a fully Klan-infested local police force and stashed in an earthen dam. Moses had a bounty on his head. Other violence ensued. From the New York Times:
White segregationists, including local law enforcement officials, responded to his efforts with violence. At one point during a voter-registration drive, a sheriff’s cousin bashed Mr. Moses’ head with a knife handle. Bleeding, he kept going, staggering up the steps of a courthouse to register a couple of Black farmers. Only then did he seek medical attention. There was no Black doctor in the county, Mr. Moses later wrote, so he had to be driven to another town, where nine stitches were sewn into his head. Another time, three Klansmen shot at a car in which Mr. Moses was a passenger as it drove through Greenwood, Miss., Mr. Moses cradled the bleeding driver and managed to bring the careening car to a stop.
Moses knew when to compromise and when not to compromise. He stormed out of the 1964 Democratic National Convention when the party refused to seat the integrated slate of delegates from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, instead offering a watery compromise to clear the way for Lyndon Johnson’s coronation. In the 1970s, after working in opposition to the Vietnam War, Moses left the country, moved to Tanzania, and went back to teaching. He spent eight years there, returned to Cambridge, and embarked on a completely remarkable second-act.
In 1982, he partnered with his daughter’s eighth-grade teacher to teach algebra to his daughter and several other students since it was not offered in her school. At the time, Moses was back at Harvard, pursuing his Ph.D. in the philosophy of mathematics. Out of this, with some eventual help from the National Science Foundation, came The Algebra Project, a program to make low-income students fluent in mathematics generally and algebra in particular. Employing the same kind of clarity of vision that had made him see the ballot as the means to change Mississippi, Moses saw that the deindustrialization of the northern city and the rise of the information economy could result in generations of poor Black children. In case anyone missed the point, he memorably argued:
We are growing the equivalent of sharecroppers in our inner cities.
The Algebra Project revolutionized the teaching of mathematics and brought it to students that had been ignored for decades. Those are the people to whom Bob Moses had devoted his entire life. He was a genuine hero in the South, and I think we should put up a statue to him in the U.S. Capitol. I hear there’s some room now.
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