Bob Moses

Robert Parris Moses was born on the twenty-third of January 1935 in Harlem, New York City, one of three children of Gregory H. Moses, who worked as a janitor at the 369th Regiment Armory in Harlem, and Louise Parris Moses. Raised in the Harlem River Houses, he won a place at the selective Stuyvesant High School, graduated from Hamilton College in 1956, and earned a master's degree in philosophy at Harvard in 1957. He was teaching mathematics at the Horace Mann School when the sit-in movement drew him south.

In 1960 Moses joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and by 1961 he had begun SNCC's first voter-registration effort in McComb, Mississippi. He organized in some of the most dangerous territory in the country, enduring beatings and arrests in Amite County, where he became the first African American to file assault charges against a white attacker. Quiet, deliberate, and famously humble, he led by drawing ordinary people into their own liberation.

As director of the Council of Federated Organizations, Moses was the principal architect of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer, which brought hundreds of volunteers to register Black voters, and he helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that challenged the state's all-white delegation at the Democratic National Convention.

In 1982, aided by a MacArthur Fellowship, Moses founded the Algebra Project, using mathematics literacy as a tool for educational justice for children of color. He died on the twenty-fifth of July 2021 in Hollywood, Florida, at the age of eighty-six. May his patient, unbought courage light the road for every generation that follows.