Robert Parris Moses, a former student leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who went on to become a well-known educator, died over the weekend at the age of 86.
On the education front, Moses founded The Algebra Project, a national U.S. mathematics literacy program created to help low-income students and students of color improve their mathematical skills. The project has become a national model and is currently operational in more than 10 states.
But it was his work as a young man in the burgeoning civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s that catapulted Moses to national fame. Moses left his job as a high school math teacher and got involved in the 1964 voter registration campaign, the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project and several other defining civil rights projects that focused on voting rights. A native of Harlem, he eventually became a SNCC Field Secretary in 1960.
“Throughout his life, Bob Moses bent the arc of the moral universe towards justice,” said Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP. “He was a strategist at the core of the voting rights movement and beyond. He was a giant.”
A 1982 MacArthur Foundation fellow, Moses was passionate about education and was committed to honing his skills in the classroom. He became a visiting professor and lecturer at a number of colleges and universities across the years, including Florida International University and Princeton University. In 2004, Diverse profiled Moses.
Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, an associate professor of African American History at The Ohio State University, said that few people had as profound an impact on the civil rights movement as Moses.
“His work in Mississippi in the early 1960s helped crack that state open, leading to the end of legal segregation and the enfranchisement of African Americans,” said Jeffries who is the author of several books including Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement published last month. “But Moses did more than just help topple Jim Crow. He risked his life to empower Black Mississippians, to help them face their fear of the deadly consequences of challenging white supremacy by providing them with the encouragement – and tools – they need to lead their own struggle for freedom. And Moses kept fighting, applying the organizing lessons of the movement to the struggle for educational equity today.”
