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Cambridge Designers: F. Frederick Bruck & Phoebe Mason Bruck

Posted on January 30, 2023February 2, 2023 by ehillchc

F. Frederick Bruck

Ferdinand Friedrich (Frederick) Adrian Bruck was born on January 24, 1921, in Breslau, Germany (present-day Wroclaw, Poland) the son of Eberhard Ferdinand Bruck and Irmgard Jentzsch Bruck. At the age of 15, Ferdinand left Germany for England and enrolled at the Bootham School in York, England. As they had means to do so, Bruck’s family fled Germany due to the growing antisemitic ideology seen there. Ferdinand Bruck was listed as “Hebrew” in his immigration documents, and his father fled Germany as a “refugee scholar”, the latter finding work elsewhere in Europe and eventually landing in the United States accepting a teaching position at Harvard.

_{Bruck in his Harvard Freshman Yearbook, 1937.}

In 1937, Ferdinand Bruck arrived in Cambridge to attend Harvard University, his freshman dorm room was in Matthews Hall in Harvard Yard. His education was interrupted by World War II when he was drafted. Before leaving for the War, he and his girlfriend attended the Cocoanut Grove Nightclub in Boston, the night where the infamous fire occurred, which claimed the lives of 490 people. Bruck helped people escape from the blaze. He was hospitalized as a result of the fire and ensuing panic, and his departure for war was delayed. From the hospital, Bruck applied to the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and was accepted.

_{Aftermath of Cocoanut Grove fire, Boston, November 1942. Boston Public Library collections.}

He attended GSD during the spring and summer of 1942 but had to leave soon after for the war. He served in the US Army’s Military Intelligence Service unit back in his home country of Germany. Mr. Bruck spent the end of 1942-1945 overseas. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1943 while serving.

_{Draft registration card for Ferdinand Friedrich Adrian Bruck. Ancestry.com}

After the war, Mr. Bruck completed his time at GSD, where he learned Modernist design under Walter Gropius, a fellow German architect. During the summers, he apprenticed at the engineering firm of Stone & Webster, a major electrical engineering firm, designing power plants, dams, and other such structures along with the other estimated 800 fellow draughtsman at the company. Bruck would state in a later interview that it was not a good experience, but he learned something.

_{Ferdinand F. Bruck’s senior picture in Harvard yearbook.}

After graduating from Harvard GSD, Bruck taught at the school part-time as an Associate Professor, a position he held from 1952-1963. Concurrently, he was hired by The Architects Collaborative under former professor Walter Gropius and assisted on designs with the firm as well as accepting independent commissions under his company, F. Frederick Bruck, Architect and Associates.

After his time at Harvard, Bruck was awarded the coveted Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship in 1954 and had the opportunity to travel the world, studying Modern architecture. Upon his return to the United States, Mr. Bruck married Phoebe Ann Mason (more on her later) and the couple purchased and moved into a new home at 77 Walker Street in Cambridge, a modest Queen Anne Victorian house built in 1885. Bruck’s Modernist sensibilities were toned down for his personal updates to his residence with a simple one-story porch and entry, new windows at the sides and rear, and a renovated interior. The exterior was largely maintained which likely made the neighbors happy at the time!

_{77 Walker Street, the home to Fred and Phoebe Bruck until the 1970s.}

In 1959, Bruck received possibly his first commission in Cambridge by Peter Knapp, a psychiatrist at 77 Raymond Street, who sought an addition where he could hold meetings with clients. The house which was sited at the rear of the lot was reconstructed from an existing stable in 1938 on its existing site in the Colonial Revival style. F. Frederick Bruck envisioned an elongated Miesian-style one-story wing which would project off the side of the 1938 home. The glass addition and solid fence would create a private, inner courtyard which was landscaped to provide a feeling of solace and serenity to his patients when they visited the home. A meandering path was added to connect the driveway and detached garage to the house at the rear of the lot. Bruck was also commissioned to construct a new addition at the rear of the existing garage for Knapp’s wife’s art studio and storage space. The overall composition is not visible from the street.

_{Drawing by F. Frederick Bruck of “Knapp House Addition”, (1960) 77 Raymond Street. Cambridge ISD Plans.}

Fred Bruck’s first major new construction project in Cambridge is a project that almost never was. When renovating a 1922 house on Gray Gardens East, the owners were heartbroken to learn a fire reduced their home down to the foundation. The owners, Harvard Professor I. Bernard Cohen and Frances Davis Cohen retained Bruck in 1962 to design them a new house. In rebuilding, Fred Bruck used the same foundation from the original house, but more vertical in a townhouse form. A requirement by the owners was for large expanses of side walls without windows to give the Cohens the space they needed for paintings and Professor Cohen’s large library, which was located on the top floor overlooking mature trees. A special design feature of the house in the front hall with its arched entrance, a nod to the Federal Revival fan light transoms, and on the inside, an 18-foot-high ceiling. The façade is dominated by an exterior chimney, further accentuating the verticality of the design.

_{22 Gray Gardens East, CHC Staff photograph.}

_{22 Gray Gardens East front elevation drawing (1962)}

About the same time Bruck designed the Cohen House, he was engaged in one of the largest design competitions in the country, the Boston City Hall competition. In October 1961, Mayor John Collins announced that the City of Boston would select the design for its new City Hall through an open, nationwide design competition. By the deadline, over 200 submissions were received, and eight finalists were selected, including one from the team of F. Frederick Bruck and Ervin Y. Galantay (a visiting architecture professor at Harvard GSD at the time). The duo’s design was a large, square building elevated on columns, with an expansive plaza surrounding. The building was on an elevated plaza which was connected to the larger open space by a bridge leading to a circular reflecting pool. The design was ultimately not chosen by the panel, who instead selected the design by the young team of Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles.

_{Proposed architectural model for Boston City Hall designed by “F Frederick Bruck and Ervin Y Galanty” (1962). Courtesy of Boston City Archives.}

Within a year after he lost the design competition for Boston City Hall, Fred Bruck was commissioned by Alan and Claire Steinert to design them a new residence in the Reservoir Hill area of West Cambridge. Alan Steinert of the Steinert Piano family and his wife Claire were in their sixties and when they purchased the former Charles C. Little House on Highland Street, they decided it was too large and dated for their tastes. It was demolished and Fred Bruck was hired to design a one-story Modern house to accommodate the aging couple, their art collection, and allow for social gatherings. The couple insisted on having the latest technologies, including central air-conditioning, radiant heating, and low voltage lighting to highlight their artworks. The design was featured in Architectural Record’s annual Record Houses, highlighting the best residential project designs of the past year. Describing the construction of the house, Frederick Bruck said “the house is wood frame with dark brick veneer. Brick was chosen to blend with the substantial character of the surrounding houses, to reduce maintenance, and because it is a material which could meet the sloping terrain. Wood frame was chosen for economy and to facilitate construction during the winter months.” The building remains one of the best examples of 1960s residential designs in Cambridge.

F. Frederick Bruck and his wife Phoebe moved from their Walker Street home to Coolidge Hill Road in the mid-1970s, modernizing a 1920s brick Colonial Revival house for their retirement. Other projects by Fred Bruck include the 1966 Bullfinch Office Center (remodeled in the late 1980s in the Post-Modern style by Graham Gund), the 1970 Charlestown Fire Station, and dozens of private residences all over New England. Fred Bruck died on May 14, 1997 and is buried at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.

Phoebe A. Mason Bruck

Phoebe Ann Mason was born in Highland Park, Illinois on November 26, 1928, the daughter of George Allen Mason and Louise Townsend Barnard. After attending Bard College from 1946 to 1949, she studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s (IIT) Institute of Design, which was founded as the New Bauhaus. There, Phoebe was introduced to Modern architecture and design, which would impact her taste and career for decades to come. She graduated from IIT in 1954.

_{Undated photo of Phoebe Ann Mason Bruck, Cambridge Chronicle 2004.}

While in Illinois, Phoebe worked as a designer at Baldwin Kingree, a women-owned Modern design store established in 1947 in Chicago. Baldwin Kingree was founded by Kitty Baldwin Weese (wife of Modernist architect Harry Weese) and Jody Kingree. The store specialized in Scandinavian Modern furnishings to fill American homes with affordable, architect-designed furniture and objects. While in Chicago working at Baldwin-Kingree, Phoebe was spotted by Ben Thompson of The Architects Collaborative, who convinced her to move to Cambridge to serve as head of the design department for his new store.

In Cambridge, Phoebe worked as Head of the Design Department at Design Research, Inc., a home furnishing store in an old, mansard-roofed house on Brattle Street. In her capacity as head designer for Design Research, Phoebe worked often with The Architects Collaborative (TAC) and Sert, Jackson Associates Inc., on many of their projects providing designs and furnishings for interior spaces. While working with Design Research and TAC, Phoebe met F. Frederick Bruck, and they married in 1956. Phoebe, like many women in the design profession at the time, likely consulted and worked on dozens of projects where she is not credited, it is unclear as to how many projects Phoebe was involved with during her time at TAC or Sert, Jackson, Associates.

_{Original Design Research Harvard Square store, c.1968. CHC Collections.}

_{Design Research, Inc. new Cambridge store, 48 Brattle Street, c.1972. UVA: Richard Guy Wilson Architecture Archive.}

Early in their marriage, Phoebe earned a master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from Harvard University in 1963, and would join forces professionally with her life partner, Fred Bruck at his firm F. Frederick Bruck Architect and Associates, Inc. At the firm, Phoebe wore many hats consulting on furnishings and interiors for her husband’s projects as well as developing landscape plans and designs complimentary to Mr. Bruck’s Modern designs.

In 1968, Phoebe stumbled upon an advertisement in the Boston Globe, which marketed land in New Hampshire, suitable for a vacation retreat. The ad read, “…Strafford. 48 acres. Mountain top, excellent view. You can see for miles. Small log cabin. Timber cut off.” Phoebe and Fred Bruck travelled up to New Hampshire to find a formerly wooded lot littered with tree stumps, trees lying on top of each other, piles of empty fuel cans and exposed ledges scarred by logging operations. They had already purchased the lot and Phoebe began planning her regeneration of the devastated lot. By 1969, conditions were favorable for burning and much of the site was cleansed with a controlled fire to help restore the soil and forest. Within a year, low bush blueberries, aspen, young maples, birch, and oak trees began to sprout from the charred soil. Fred Bruck converted a former two-room (350 sq. ft.) log cabin into their summer house with decks and a detached out-house for rustic living when visiting their New Hampshire property. Phoebe restored the forest and developed natural gardens scattered throughout the property. The restoration of the forest here was featured in Landscape Architecture Magazine. Phoebe ended the article by writing:

“Ten years after logging, piles of rotting slash still remain in the far corners and along the edges of the property, a vivid reminder of the devastation and seeming destruction which once pervaded the entire site. The green tidal wave of vigorous young pines, birches, oaks and maples, which threatens the engulf the woodlot gives new meaning to the concept of regeneration, for the land as well for its owners.”

_{Landscape Architecture Magazine: Vol. 69, No. 2 (March 1979).}

Phoebe was very busy in Cambridge architecture and landscape circles. She worked as a design critic for the Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard GSD concurrently with her serving as a judge for the New England Flower Show from 1971-1979. She also served on various boards and committees including the Harvard Square Association, the Harvard Square Advisory Committee, the Quincy Square Design Committee, and served as President of the Boston Society of Landscape Architects (BSLA) from 1973-1975.

Phoebe was a force in her role as President of the Harvard Square Defense Fund and as chair of the Harvard Square Advisory Committee, where she pushed on architects, developers, and the City of Cambridge, advocating for high-quality design that maintained the character of the square. Phoebe was always firm in her positions and was very active in city life in Cambridge until she passed away in 2004. She was buried next to her partner, Fred, on Azalea Path in Mount Auburn Cemetery.

_{Grave memorial for Fred and Phoebe Bruck. Courtesy of Mt. Auburn Cemetery.}

Gothic, Glass, and the Goodhues

Posted on December 1, 2021December 6, 2021 by ehillchc

The Arts and Crafts Movement developed in England in the 1860s in response to the increasing industrialization of production. Factories were turning out everything from furniture and fabric to architectural elements and selling all cheaply. Advocates of the movement believed that these mass-produced items lacked style, beauty, and individuality and desired a return to the unique, high-quality goods made by artisans and artists using traditional methods.

Arts and Crafts ideals migrated to America beginning in the 1880s. In 1897, the first US exhibition of contemporary crafts was organized by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and sparked a design reform movement in the United States. Craftspeople, consumers, and manufacturers realized the aesthetic and technical potential of the applied arts. Architects, artists, and intellectuals were influenced by their studies of old English architecture and design; Gothic Revival and Tudor Revival buildings proliferated in Cambridge and across the country.

The brothers Bertram and Harry Goodhue were early practitioners of medieval Gothic design and helped transform American architecture and art for decades to come.

Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue

*^{Bertram Goodhue, undated. Courtesy of Panama-California Exposition Digital Archive.}*

Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (1869-1924) was born in Pomfret, Connecticut, to Charles Wells Goodhue and his second wife, Helen Grosvenor Eldredge. Bertram attended the New Haven Collegiate and Commercial Institute. He became enamored of the Gothic-style buildings on Yale’s nearby campus. He wanted to become an architect himself but could not afford university, so in lieu of formal training, at sixteen years old he moved to Manhattan to apprentice at the architectural firm of Renwick, Aspinwall and Russell. He later relocated to Boston, where he joined other young, artistic intellectuals to found Boston’s Society of Arts and Crafts. Through this group Goodhue met  Ralph Adams Cram; the two men would be business partners for almost twenty-five years. In 1891, they founded the architectural firm of Cram, Wentworth and Goodhue (renamed Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson in 1898 after Wentworth’s death) and became proponents of Neo-Gothic architecture, accepting commissions from significant ecclesiastical, academic, and institutional clients. Their 1902 design of the United States Military Academy at West Point was a major milestone in the firm’s career.

*^{Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (left) and Ralph Adams Cram (center) in their Boston architectural studio with a client (and a dog).  Courtesy of Cram & Ferguson archives.}*

Soon after, the company opened an office in New York where Goodhue would preside, leaving Cram to operate in Boston. At first, the men worked as a productive team, complementing each other’s strengths; later they began to compete, sometimes submitting independent proposals for the same commission. The partnership ended when Cram was selected as the architect of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan– on Goodhue’s supposed turf. When Goodhue left to begin his own practice in 1914, Cram had already created his dreamed-of Gothic Revival commission at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, and continued to work in the Gothic style mode for the rest of his career. Goodhue branched out from the Gothic mode which gained him such prominence, and designed notable Byzantine and Spanish Revival buildings all over the country. He died in 1924 at the age of fifty-four and at his request was interred in a wall vault at the Church of the Intercession, the building he considered his finest design. The centerpiece of the monument is a life-size effigy of Goodhue in the manner of those preserved in medieval English country churches.

Church of the Intercession, designed by Bertram Goodhue, the building he considered his finest design. Image c.1915 by Wurst Brothers.

Harry Eldredge Goodhue

Harry Eldredge Goodhue (1873-1918), Bertram’s younger brother, was born in Pomfret, Connecticut, and attended the Holderness School in Plymouth, New Hampshire. In 1892, at nineteen, he joined the Boston Art Students’ Association and became an advocate for and expert in traditional stained glassmaking processes. Harry began designing stained glass for his brother’s firm and was sent to Europe to study, draw, and collect medieval stained glass. In 1900, Bertram Goodhue’s firm was chosen as the architect of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Newport, Rhode Island; in 1902, Harry began designing their Brown Memorial Window, his first major commission. The window was the first in America to be made of antique glass in accordance with techniques refined in thirteenth-century Europe. From this, Harry became known as one of only three stained glass artisans then reviving the art of medieval glassmaking.

Harry Goodhue opened his own shop at 23 Church Street in Harvard Square, Cambridge, in 1903, soon after completing the memorial window. He was sought-after by church people and architects who were intrigued by the medieval quality of his translucent and richly colored hand-blown stained glass and preferred it to the opaque opalescent glass that was popular at the time. Opalescent stained glass was developed in the late nineteenth century by John La Farge and Louis C. Tiffany and presents a milky, streaky, and iridescent appearance. In 1903 Harry wrote a piece for the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts’ monthly publication, Handicraft, criticizing the opalescent “American” style as not really stained glass, for it is absolutely different from what has been understood by the term.” In a subsequent issue, the artist Sarah Wyman Whitman (featured previously on our blog) wrote in opposition to Goodhue’s opinion and praised the experimentations of La Farge and Tiffany in the development of the opalescent/American method and claimed that academics and experts varied in their preference.

_{Circa 1930 image of 23 Church Street with added fourth floor for Goodhue studio. Cambridge Historical Commission Photograph.}

With additional positive press and commissions from churches and homeowners, Goodhue outgrew his studio on Church Street. When asked, the property owner obliged him by adding an entire floor to the building. The addition was completed in 1907, and Goodhue expanded his company. However, by 1916, Harry’s business was in decline, and he closed his Cambridge shop. 23 Church street would later be heavily altered in 1936 when the top three floors were removed and the building redesigned in the Art Deco style we see today.

*^{23 Church Street (2019). CHC staff photo.}*

After closing his Cambridge shop, Harry became affiliated with Vaughan & O’Neill & Co. that had a studio on Sudbury Street. Harry’s brother Bertram felt that this company was beneath his brother and refused to order windows from them. Between 1903 and his death in 1918, Goodhue created antique stained glass windows for more than seventy buildings in twenty-one states and Canada. During fifteen plus years of perfecting his craft, he trained dozens of apprentices, including his wife, Mary, and their eldest son, Harry.

*^{All Saints Church, Ashmont. Adoration by Kings and Shepherds window by Harry Eldredge Goodhue, pre-restoration, 1898. © Julie L. Sloan}*

Mary Louise Goodhue

Mary Louise (Wright) Goodhue (1876-1965) was born in Cincinnati to Juliet and Daniel T. Wright. Her father was a judge on the Ohio Supreme Court, and her brother, Daniel, held an Associate Justice seat on the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia. Mary married Harry Goodhue in 1904 and had three sons, Harry, Daniel, and William. The couple settled in Cambridge and first resided on Buckingham Place, soon after, relocating to a rental on Martin Street. By 1908 the family had bought a house lot on Fayerweather Street and hired the architectural firm of Newhall and Blevins to design an Arts and Crafts style house. Mary taught singing and violin at her home to young students and assisted her husband in his growing stained glass company.

Mrs. Goodhue was the president of the Cambridge Musical Club, as well as a suffragist. When Harry died in 1918, she took over the stained glass company; she fulfilled commissions and taught their eldest son the art of making antique glass. In a 1920 Boston Globe article, Mary explained her ability to take over the family business so quickly. “Having worked so much with my husband, it comes easy for me to carry on the business. I have hundreds of his designs to guide me and find little trouble in selecting portions of them for the work I get. I know all about his ideals and became so impregnated with his imagination and genius that I love the work, even as did he.” She continued, “when he [Harry] died, I simply had to take up the practical part of the work, but as I was well taught in the artistic part, I found no trouble in mastering the business part.” The article listed Mary as the only female, stained glass maker in America and highlighted her winning proposal for a memorial window to be placed in Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in celebration of the Massachusetts Bay Tercentenary. She had bested dozens of male artists to win the commission.

*^{Photograph of Pilgrim Hall windows by Mary L. Goodhue. © Julie L. Sloan}*

Mary Goodhue is credited with stained glass windows in churches in the Boston area and as far as Providence and Detroit. Her memorial windows at Pilgrim Hall and the First Parish Church of Brookline are her most notable. When Harry, the oldest, came of age, he took up the family business, and Mary returned to her other passion, music. In 1935 she wrote “Stagefright and its Cure“, to help musicians and public speakers understand the psychological reasons for stage fright and ways to overcome it. Mary lived at the family home on Fayerweather Street until her mid-80s. After the Great Depression, when her children had left home, she converted the single-family to a duplex and rented out one side for income. She died in Braintree, Massachusetts, at eighty-eight years old.

*^{56 Fayerweather Street, built in 1914 for Harry and Mary Goodhue. CHC photo 11-2021.}*

Harry “Wright Goodhue

Harry Wright Goodhue (1905-1931) closely followed his father’s footsteps in medieval stained glass artistry, but in order to distinguish himself from his father, he went by Wright Goodhue, his middle and mother’s maiden name. Growing up in Cambridge, Wright spent most of his free time in his father’s studio, learning how to make stained glass windows the old way. Wright’s “studio” was described in a newspaper account published when he was 11 years old. “In a corner of the roomy studio where his father works, young Harry set up his easel and his drawing board. Here he spends long hours depicting the deeds of the Round Table knights, the battles of biblical heroes…”

He attended the Russell School before attending the Cambridge Latin School, leaving after two years. Instead of a conventional education, Wright attended evening classes at the Boston Normal Art School and worked as a draftsman at the architectural firm of Allen & Collins during the day at just 16 years old.

His first two professional projects were executed in 1921 at just sixteen years old. He designed the ornamental details for the wooden doors at Lindsey Memorial Chapel (an addition designed by Allen & Collens to Emmanuel Episcopal Church on Newbury Street, Boston, and he designed his first stained glass window – the chancel window for his uncle Bertram’s First Cong. Church, Montclair, New Jersey. Soon after, while working as a draftsman under Allen & Collens, Wright was asked to design 36 stained glass medallions for the Teachers’ College at Columbia University, a commission the practice was working on. This commission allowed Wright and his mother to purchase a studio space in Boston, when Wright was just eighteen.

Soon after, when his employer received the contract to design the Second Universalist Church (now St. Clement Eucharistic Shrine) in Boston, he was asked to provide windows for the Gothic style building. Together with his mother, the artist, in his teens, furnished designs and made the windows. Soon after, stained glass commissions came in rapidly. Window commissions overwhelmed the small operation included an 18-foot rose window for the Sacred Heart Church in Jersey City. Wright completed three commissions in Cambridge. He designed six circular clerestory windows as part of Allen & Collens’ 1923 restoration of Bigelow Chapel at Mount Auburn Cemetery, the Josephine Peabody Marks window for Radcliffe College, and the Martha and Lazarus Window at St. James Church in North Cambridge. Wright began to regret his lack of formal education, and even as his workload grew, he began to study for the entrance exam for admission to Harvard. He was admitted to Harvard in 1927 at the age of 22. Spread thin between his work and schooling, he left at the end of two years, without a degree.

*^{1924 passport application photo of Wright Goodhue, then 19 years old.}*

As his prominence in the field grew, the young man became consumed with work. His career hit a crescendo when Allen & Collens were selected to collaborate on the design of the 22-story Riverside Church in Manhattan, with Wright asked to design and make some of the windows for the massive edifice. The Riverside Church was modeled after the 13th Century Gothic cathedral in Chartres, France, a building Wright understood well from his earlier trip to Chartres and other medieval towns and cities in Europe. Wright’s 1924 passport application explained he would be visiting France and England to “study”. This trip was possibly inspired by the Riverside Church commission and from his father’s writings about the Chartres Cathedral and it’s renowned 12th-century stained glass windows.

*^{Photograph of Mercy window in Riverside Church, Wright Goodhue. © Julie L. Sloan}*

*^{Clipping of Wright Goodhue with his mother, Mary Louise Goodhue, designing the Mercy window for Riverside Church, NY. Photo courtesy of Riverside Church Archives.}*

In 1930, Wright married Cornelia Evans, an academic and writer, who studied at Lasell Seminary for Young Women and Wellesley College, both in Massachusetts, and later Columbia University, New York City. The couple resided in Greenwich Village. Tragically, in 1931 just one month after his 26th birthday, Wright Goodhue died by suicide at a hotel in Providence. He was buried in the family plot in the Old North Cemetery in Pomfret, Connecticut. After his death, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, featured his work in an exhibition. His mother also donated some of his works to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In his 1936 autobiography, Ralph Adams Cram, an architect who worked with Wright on numerous commissions, recalled Wright’s “great, unhappy, and unique genius”. Cram reminisced about Wright’s genius in a 1932 piece in Stained Glass Magazine, where he mentioned Wright’s final completed piece, a wood sculpture “Madonna and Child”. Cram writes, “There is something mystical about this last work of his which, in a way, links it with the shadow that came heavily and increasingly upon him during the last years of his life…”

^{Photograph of Wright’s final completed work, “Madonna and Child”. From Stained Glass Magazine 09-1932.}

Remembering Bob Moses (1935-2021)

Posted on July 30, 2021August 4, 2021 by ehillchc

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.

*Bob Moses in Mississippi, 1963. Photo by Harvey Richards*

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.

*Bob Moses in NY, 1964. Roberty Elfstrom photographer, via Getty*.

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.

*Bob Moses at SNCC conference in Waveland, MS, November 1964, Photo by Danny Lyon.*

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.

*Bob Moses (right) protesting the Vietnam War in Washington, DC, Aug. 6, 1965. Moses and fellow protestors were splashed with red paint by counter-protesters.*

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.