Today, we continue to mourn the loss of the great Bob Moses, but celebrate his life and legacy in Cambridge, Mississippi, and nation-wide. Robert Parris Moses was born in 1935 in New York City, where his parents Gregory and Louise, a janitor and homemaker, respectively, prioritized education in the home. Raised in a public housing complex, Moses attended New York City’s public but highly selective Stuyvesant High School, before graduating from Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., eventually earning a master’s degree in Philosophy in 1957 from Harvard. He continued his education at Harvard, but the death of his mother and subsequent illness of his father reportedly forced Moses to abandon his doctoral studies, and return to New York, where he became a math teacher in the Bronx.
When news spread about the civil rights movement, specifically the denial of African Americans the right to register and vote in the South, he was compelled to leave teaching in 1960 and travel to Mississippi. The young civil rights advocate tried to empower Black Mississippians—often sharecroppers—to vote. Moses faced violence from the KKK, local police forces, and other white segregationists for his successful attempts. 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. When he tried to file charges against a white assailant, an all-white jury acquitted the man, but luckily a judge provided protection to Moses to the county line so he could leave. Undeterred, Bob continued his fight.
Moses was known as one of the best grass-roots organizers in the civil rights movement in the South, and was often compared to Martin Luther King Jr. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch noted this about Bob, “He is really the father of grass-roots organizing—not the Moses summoning his people on the mountaintop as King did but, ironically, the anti-Moses, going door to door, listening to people, letting them lead.” Moses developed the idea for the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, which recruited northern college students to join Mississippi blacks conducting a grassroots voter registration drive. When local blacks were excluded from participating in the all-white “regular” Democratic Party, Moses suggested creating the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which sought recognition as the representative delegation from Mississippi at the Democratic National Convention of 1964. He worked closely with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on voter registration drives.
As his notoriety grew, Moses would withdraw from the primary ranks of the movement, fearing that his presence would overshadow its needs. He turned his attentions to protesting the Vietnam War, noting in a 1965 speech that “the prosecutors of the war” were “the same people who refused to protect civil rights in the South.” He spoke out against the war and worked with young leaders to march and protest in cities all along the east coast. Suspiciously, he was drafted soon thereafter, despite being five years over the age limit. Denied conscientious-objector status, Moses and his wife Janet moved first to Canada and then to Tanzania, where he taught school. There, the couple began a family; three of their four children were born on the continent.
In 1977, Moses returned to the States to resume his Ph.D. studies in the philosophy of mathematics at Harvard. Those studies would serve both him and the community well. In 1982, the then 47-year-old discovered his daughter Maisha’s eighth grade class didn’t offer algebra. At the invitation of her teacher, Moses began to teach advanced work to Maisha and several classmates; a development that would soon after evolve into The Algebra Project, a program which relies on igniting enthusiasm among students by having them link common daily tasks to basic mathematical procedures. “Math literacy is a civil right,” said Moses. “Just as Black people in Mississippi saw the vote as a tool to elevate them into the first class politically, math is the tool to elevate the young into the first class economically.”
Moses lived in the Port neighborhood of Cambridge with his family for a number of years before moving, eventually settling in Florida. The family lived at a house at the corner of School and Cherry streets. They restored the house and were given one of our first ever Cambridge Preservation Awards. Another lasting legacy in Cambridge is the Moses Youth Center on Harvard Street in the Port neighborhood of Cambridge, so named after Bob and his wife Janet. The building was renamed after the couple in 2015 by the Cambridge City Council in honor of the couple’s “tremendous contributions to the continuing civil rights movement and their unwavering dedication to the progress of all Cambridge residents.” Bob Moses died on Sunday, July 25 at the age of 86 in Hollywood, Florida. He is survived by his wife Janet, daughters Maisha and Malaika, sons Omowale and Tabasuri, and seven grandchildren.
