Robert Paris Moses, a civil rights activist who faced beatings and prison during the 1960s while leading a black voter registration campaign in the American South and later helping to reform minority education in math, has died Is. He was 86 years old.
Moses worked to end segregation as the Mississippi area director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement and was the center of the 1964 independence summer in which hundreds of students went south to register voters.
Moses began his second chapter in civil rights work in 1982 by founding the Algebra Project for MacArthur Fellowship. The project included a curriculum that Moses developed to help poor students succeed in math.
Ben Moynihan, Director of Operations for the Algebra Project, said he had spoken to Dr. Janet Moses, Moses’ wife, and she said her husband had died Sunday morning in Hollywood, Florida. Information about the cause of death was not given.
Moses was born in Harlem, New York, on January 23, 1935, two months after a race riot killed three people and injured 60 in the neighborhood. His grandfather, William Henry Moses, has been a prominent Southern Baptist preacher and supporter of Marcus Garvey, a black nationalist leader at the turn of the century.
But like many black families, the Moses family moved from south to north during the Great Migration. Once in Harlem, her family sold milk from a Black-owned cooperative to help supplement household income, according to Robert Paris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots, by Laura Visser-Messen By.
While attending Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, he became a Rhodes Scholar and was deeply influenced by the work of the French philosopher Albert Camus and his ideas of rationality and moral correctness for social change. Moses then took part in a Quaker-sponsored trip to Europe and solidified his beliefs that change came from the bottom up before earning a master’s in philosophy at Harvard University.
Moses did not spend much time in the Deep South until he went on a recruitment tour in 1960 to see the movement for himself. He sought out the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, but found little activity in the office and soon turned his attention to the SNCC.
I was taught about being denied the right to vote in Europe behind the Iron Curtain, Moses later said. I never knew the right to vote was denied behind a cotton veil here in the United States.
A young civil rights advocate attempted to register blacks to vote in Mississippi’s rural Emmite County where he was beaten up and arrested. When he tried to file charges against a white assailant, a white jury acquitted the man and a judge provided Moses with security across the county line so he could go.
He later helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which sought to challenge the all-white Democratic delegation from Mississippi. But President Lyndon Johnson barred a group of rebel Democrats from voting at the convention and instead let Jim Crowne’s Southerners draw national attention.
Frustrated by the white liberal reaction to the civil rights movement, Moses soon began participating in demonstrations against the Vietnam War and then cut all ties with whites, even former members of the SNCC.
Moses worked as a teacher in Tanzania, Africa, returned to Harvard to earn a doctorate in philosophy, and taught high school mathematics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Later in life, press-shy Moses began his second chapter in civil rights work by founding the Algebra Project in 1982.
Historian Taylor Branch, whose Parting the Waters won the Pulitzer Prize, said that Moses’ leadership embodied a paradox.
In addition to attracting the same kind of adoration among young people as Martin Luther King in the adult movement, Branch said, Moses represented a different concept of leadership, which was generated and carried out by ordinary people.
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Former AP reporter Russell Contreras was the primary contributor to this report.
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