Robert Parris Moses (January 23, 1935 – July 25, 2021) was an American educator and civil rights activist known for his work as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on voter education and registration in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement, and his co-founding of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. As part of his work with the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition of the Mississippi branches of the four major civil rights organizations (SNCC, CORE, NAACP, SCLC), he was the main organizer for the Freedom Summer Project.
Born and raised in Harlem, he was a graduate of Hamilton College and later earned a Master's degree in philosophy at Harvard University. He spent the 1960s working in the civil rights and anti-war movements, until he was drafted in 1966 and left the country, spending much of the following decade in Tanzania, teaching and working with the Ministry of Education.
After returning to the US, in 1982, Moses received a MacArthur Fellowship and began developing the Algebra Project. The math literacy program emphasizes teaching algebra skills to minority students based on broad-based community organizing and collaboration with parents, teachers, and students, to improve college and job readiness.
Early life
Robert Parris Moses was born January 23, 1935, in New York City. His parents, Gregory H. Moses, a janitor, and Louise (Parris) Moses, a homemaker, raised their three children in the public housing complex, Harlem River Houses, with frequent visits to the public library. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1952 and received his B.A. from Hamilton College in 1956. At Hamilton he majored in philosophy and French and played basketball. In 1957, he earned an M.A. in philosophy at Harvard, and was working toward a PhD but his mother's death and father's hospitalization brought him back to New York City, and in 1958 began teaching math at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx of New York City. Also in 1958, he was private tutor to singer Frankie Lymon, of The Teenagers, and credited his experience visiting Black sections of numerous towns with the doo-wop group for his recognition of the emergence of a distinct urban Black culture scattered across the nation.
Civil rights movement
Moses described his civil rights activism starting in the spring of 1960, when he visited his uncle, Hampton Institute professor of architecture William Henry Moses Jr. and witnessed Hampton students marching from the college to Newport News, Virginia as part of the sit-in movement. Moses went on to becoming field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Following the direction of Ella Baker, he began working in Mississippi, becoming director of the SNCC's Mississippi Project in 1961 and traveling to Pike County and Amite County, developing a network of grassroots activists to try to register black voters. Comprising a majority in both counties, despite many people leaving in the Great Migration in the first half of the century, they had been utterly closed out of the political process since 1890, by poll taxes, residency requirements, and subjective literacy tests. It was nearly impossible for blacks to register and vote. After decades of violence and repression under Jim Crow, by the 1960s, most blacks did not bother trying to register. In 1965, only one African American among 5500 in Amite County was registered to vote. Initiating and organizing voter registration drives as well as sit-ins and Freedom Schools, Moses pushed for the SNCC to engage in a "tactical nonviolence," a matter he discussed in an interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?.
Moses faced nearly relentless violence and official intimidation and was beaten and arrested in Amite County. He was the first African American to challenge white violence in the county, filing assault charges against his attacker. The all-white jury acquitted the man, and the judge told Moses he could not protect him, escorting him to the county line. Around Moses, others in the movement like Herbert Lee and witnesses like Louis Allen were murdered.