Moses, Robert (1935–)

Robert Parris Moses has been a controversial figure in the American civil rights movement for more than 45 years.

Moses, an African American, first became aware of civil rights issues after visiting an uncle in Hampton, Virginia, in 1960, where he witnessed a sit-in orchestrated by African American students in Newport News, Virginia. He joined the protest and began his lifelong journey as a civil rights activist. In the summer of 1960, Moses volunteered to work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an Atlanta-based civil rights organization founded in 1957 by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other prominent African American civil rights leaders. As a volunteer in the SCLC movement, Moses traveled to [Page 978]Mississippi to recruit students to attend the October 1960 conference in Atlanta, Georgia, sponsored by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a student-led civil rights organization. SNCC had been founded 6 months earlier at Shaw University, Raleigh, North Carolina, and was dedicated to helping local communities and their leaders take a more active role in the civil rights movement.

Hooked on the civil rights movement, Moses resigned his position as a mathematics teacher at the Horace Mann Middle School in New York City in 1961 to commit his life to social activism. In July 1961, he became the field secretary for SNCC in Mississippi and the director of the Mississippi Project, which focused on voter registration drives for blacks living in Mississippi. Soon afterward, he cofounded the Council of Federated Organizations. In 1964, Moses was intimately involved in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, a project in which university students converged on Mississippi to undertake an intensive African American voter registration drive. Two years later, in May 1966, Stokely Carmichael replaced John Lewis as SNCC chairman, and the organization embraced a militant philosophy. Unhappy with this new direction, Moses resigned from SNCC.

Moses opposed the U.S. involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s. Declaring himself a conscientious objector in 1966, he resisted military service and sought safe haven in Canada. In 1969, Moses left Canada and went to Tanzania, East Africa, where he taught for about 6 years. Taking advantage of amnesty in the post-Vietnam era, he returned to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1976 to complete his doctorate in mathematics at Harvard University. Afterward he taught mathematics in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, high school. In 1982, armed with a prestigious “no-strings” 5-year, $500,000 financial genius award from the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Moses had the financial resources to embark on a new civil rights movement—the Algebra Project—an innovative project aimed at improving the mathematics proficiencies of minority youngsters attending an inner-city school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, through the use of unconventional approaches to mathematics. Moses articulated the view that education, algebra in particular, was the cornerstone for African American youngsters to become first-class citizens in the information age of the new millennium. Since then, Moses has expanded the reach of the Algebra Project from Cambridge to schools in other cities, including the South. The Algebra Project, like his earlier work in civil rights, helped transform the lives of African Americans throughout the country.

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