Robert Parris Moses (January 23, 1935 – July 25, 2021) was an American educator and civil rights activist known for his work as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on voter education and registration in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement, and his co-founding of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
[9] Comprising a majority in both counties, despite many people leaving in the Great Migration in the first half of the century, they had been utterly closed out of the political process since 1890, by poll taxes, residency requirements, and subjective literacy tests.
[11] Initiating and organizing voter registration drives as well as sit-ins and Freedom Schools,[12] Moses pushed for the SNCC to engage in a "tactical nonviolence," a matter he discussed in an interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?.
A major leader with SNCC, he was the main organizer of COFO's Freedom Summer Project, which was intended to achieve widespread voter registration of blacks in Mississippi, and ultimately end racial disfranchisement.
[1] On June 21, as many of the new volunteers were getting settled and trained in nonviolent resistance, three were murdered: James Chaney, a local African American, and his two Jewish co-leaders Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, both from New York City.
[19] Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic leadership nonetheless prevented any of the MFDP delegation from voting in the convention, giving the official seats to the Jim Crow regulars.
[3] Moses was also disturbed by the machinations of liberal Democrats, whom he had invited into COFO, to centralize the Council's decision-making, an effort that seemed to undermine the grassroots participatory democracy of SNCC.
[3] Speaking at the April 17, 1965, demonstration at the Washington Monument, Moses drew a connection between the anti-war effort and the civil rights struggle.
[3][25] After President Jimmy Carter offered amnesty to draft resisters, Moses returned to the United States[3] and to Harvard, completing doctoral work in philosophy.
[3] He used the award to create the Algebra Project, devoted to improving minority education in math, starting with his daughter's classroom.
[28] Moses believed that algebra in particular was a critical "gatekeeper" subject because mastering it was necessary in order for middle school students to advance in math, technology, and science; college was out of reach without it.
[24] Thus, they could better meet requirements for college admission and future entry into good jobs,[24] as opposed to being tracked into low-paying, low-skill work.
[28] Since 1982, Moses expanded the Algebra Project to more schools, developing models that are sustainable and focused on students by building coalitions of stakeholders within the local communities, particularly historically underserved populations.
[29] ''I believe that solving the problem requires exactly the kind of community organizing that changed the South in the 1960s'', he told The New York Times in 2001.
They merge in his new book ... the themes – equality, empowerment, citizenship – ripple through like ribbons, tying the two experiences in the same long-term struggle.
[33] As a visiting scholar at Princeton University, he taught an African American Studies class with Professor Tera Hunter in the Spring 2012 semester.