Bob Moses, Crusader for Civil Rights and Math Education, Dies at 86
Source: New York Times
Bob Moses, a soft-spoken pioneer of the civil rights movement who faced relentless intimidation and brutal violence to register Black voters in Mississippi in the 1960s, and who later started a national organization devoted to teaching math as a means to a more equal society, died on Sunday at his home in Hollywood, Fla. He was 86. His daughter Maisha Moses confirmed his death. She did not specify a cause. In 1960, Mr. Moses was teaching math at the private Horace Mann School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx when scenes of Black people picketing and sitting at lunch counters across the South “hit me powerfully, in the soul as well as the brain,” he recalled in the book “Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project,” which he wrote with Charles E. Cobb Jr.
He went to Mississippi to organize poor, illiterate and rural Black residents, and quickly became a legend among civil rights organizers in a state known for enforcing segregation with cross burnings and lynchings. Over the next five years, he helped to register thousands of voters and trained a generation of organizers in makeshift freedom schools. In an era when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was drawing vast crowds with his soaring oratory, Mr. Moses looked for inspiration to an older, less well-known generation of organizers like Ella Baker, a leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, drawing on her “quiet work in out-of-the-way places and the commitment of organizers digging into local communities.”
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’s 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. Arrested and jailed many times, Mr. Moses developed a reputation for extraordinary calm in the face of horrific violence. Taylor Branch, the author of “Parting the Waters,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the early Civil Rights movement, told The New York Times in 1993 that “in Mississippi, Bob Moses was the equivalent of Martin Luther King.”
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/25/us/bob-moses-dead.html
Wow. Another warrior crusader has fallen.
Last year on his Moses' birthday, SiriusXM talker and activist Joe Madison had posted this on his Facebook page -
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#OTD in 1935, activist Bob Moses was born in Harlem, New York. In 1960, Moses became the field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In 1964, Moses became co-director of the Council of Federated Organizations—the group supported #CivilRights activists working in Mississippi, and was instrumental in the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
#History #BlackHistory
https://www.facebook.com/MadisonSiriusXM/photos/otd-in-1935-activist-bob-moses-was-born-in-harlem-new-york-in-1960-moses-became-/10158367114177125/
So Moses was also involved with SNCC (like Rep. John Lewis).
R.I.P., thank you for your hard and sacrificial work, and condolences to your family.
= new reply since forum marked as read
RIP, Bob.
I first read about him in the book Letters From Mississippi, about the 1964 Freedom Summer Voting Project. This book was the 1965 version and was telling the story mostly from the viewpoint of the white northern college students who volunteered to go down there.
Since then, 50 years after that summer, a revised version is now available which includes poetry by students in the Freedom Schools established during that period.
https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Mississippi-Reports-Volunteers-Freedom/dp/0939010925/ref=pd_sbs_1/134-3048686-5102465?pd_rd_w=0jThB&pf_rd_p=f8e24c42-8be0-4374-84aa-bb08fd897453&pf_rd_r=13X8D6P9ZSF4RJD4G2T4&pd_rd_r=bf510081-6521-443f-9217-47abf1da4cf9&pd_rd_wg=DZQss&pd_rd_i=0939010925&psc=1
