Robert Parris Moses (born
HarlemHarlem is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, long known as a major African-American residential, cultural, and business center. Originally a Dutch village, formally organized in 1658, it is named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands.Harlem has been defined by a series...
,
New YorkNew York is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States and is the nation's third most populous. The state is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, January 23, 1935, usually known as
Bob Moses) is an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
HarvardHarvard University is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and currently comprises ten separate academic units...
-trained educator who joined the civil rights movement and later founded the nationwide
U.S.The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
Algebra projectThe Algebra Project is a national U.S. mathematics literacy effort aimed at helping low-income students and students of color successfully achieve mathematical skills that are a prerequisite for a college preparatory mathematics sequence in high school...
.
Moses graduated from
Stuyvesant High SchoolStuyvesant High School , commonly referred to as Stuy , is a New York City public high school that specializes in mathematics and science. It is one of the most competitive public high schools in the United States, sending more students to some of the nation's most prestigious universities than...
in 1952 and received his B.A. from
Hamilton CollegeHamilton College is a private, independent, liberal arts college located in Clinton, New York. The college is known for its emphasis on writing and speaking...
in 1956. He studied
philosophyPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...
at Harvard and obtained a teaching certificate, then began teaching at the
Horace Mann SchoolThe Horace Mann School is an independent college preparatory school in New York City founded in 1887. Horace Mann offers courses from nursery school to the twelfth grade and is a member of the Ivy Preparatory School League...
in Manhattan in 1958.
He began working with civil rights activists in 1960, becoming field secretary for the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating CommitteeThe Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ' was one of the principal organizations of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It emerged from a series of student meetings led by Ella Baker held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960...
(SNCC).
Robert Parris Moses (born
HarlemHarlem is a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Manhattan, long known as a major African-American residential, cultural, and business center. Originally a Dutch village, formally organized in 1658, it is named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands.Harlem has been defined by a series...
,
New YorkNew York is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States and is the nation's third most populous. The state is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, January 23, 1935, usually known as
Bob Moses) is an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
HarvardHarvard University is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and currently comprises ten separate academic units...
-trained educator who joined the civil rights movement and later founded the nationwide
U.S.The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
Algebra projectThe Algebra Project is a national U.S. mathematics literacy effort aimed at helping low-income students and students of color successfully achieve mathematical skills that are a prerequisite for a college preparatory mathematics sequence in high school...
.
Biography
Moses graduated from
Stuyvesant High SchoolStuyvesant High School , commonly referred to as Stuy , is a New York City public high school that specializes in mathematics and science. It is one of the most competitive public high schools in the United States, sending more students to some of the nation's most prestigious universities than...
in 1952 and received his B.A. from
Hamilton CollegeHamilton College is a private, independent, liberal arts college located in Clinton, New York. The college is known for its emphasis on writing and speaking...
in 1956. He studied
philosophyPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing these questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned...
at Harvard and obtained a teaching certificate, then began teaching at the
Horace Mann SchoolThe Horace Mann School is an independent college preparatory school in New York City founded in 1887. Horace Mann offers courses from nursery school to the twelfth grade and is a member of the Ivy Preparatory School League...
in Manhattan in 1958.
Civil Rights Movement
He began working with civil rights activists in 1960, becoming field secretary for the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating CommitteeThe Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ' was one of the principal organizations of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. It emerged from a series of student meetings led by Ella Baker held at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960...
(SNCC). As director of the SNCC's Mississippi Project, Moses traveled to the South to try to register black voters. He faced nearly relentless violence and official intimidation. He and other organizers had asked for federal protection from the
John F. KennedyJohn Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....
administration.
By 1964 Moses had become Co-Director of the
Council of Federated OrganizationsThe Council of Federated Organizations was formed in Mississippi in 1962.A coalition of the major Civil Rights Movement organizations operating in Mississippi, COFO was formed to coordinate and unite voter registration and other civil rights activities in the state and oversee the distribution of...
(COFO), an
umbrella organizationAn umbrella organization is an association of institutions, who work together formally to coordinate activities or pool resources. In business, political, or other environments, one group, the umbrella organization, provides resources and often an identity to the smaller organizations...
for the major civil rights groups then working in Mississippi. He was a leading SNCC figure, and the main organizer of COFO's
Freedom SummerFreedom Summer was a campaign in the United States launched in June 1964 to attempt to register as many African American voters as possible in Mississippi, which up to that time had almost totally excluded black voters...
project, which was intended to end racial disfranchisement. Mississippi's 1890 constitution included requirements for voter registration, such as poll taxes, residency requirements, and
literacy testLiteracy Test, in the context of United States political history, refers to the government practice of testing the literacy of potential citizens at the federal level, and potential voters at the state level. The federal government first employed literacy tests as part of the immigration process in...
s, which had long made it nearly impossible for blacks to register and vote. Because the literacy tests were subjectively administered by white voter registrars, even well-educated blacks had often been refused registration on literacy grounds. By the 1960s, many blacks did not bother to try to register. Moses was instrumental in the formation of the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic PartyThe Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was an American political party created in the state of Mississippi in 1964, during the civil rights movement...
, a group that challenged the regular
Democratic PartyThe Democratic Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. It is the oldest political party in continuous operation in the United States and it is one of the oldest parties in the world. In the U.S...
delegates from the state at the party's
1964 conventionThe 1964 National Convention of the Democratic Party of the United States took place at the Atlantic City Convention Center in Atlantic City, New Jersey, August 24 - 27, 1964. It resulted in the nomination of the incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson The 1964 National Convention of the Democratic Party of...
.
When
Stokely CarmichaelStokely Standiford Churchill Carmichael , also known as Kwame Toure, was a Trinidadian-American black activist active in the 1960s American Civil Rights Movement. He rose to prominence first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of...
became SNCC president in 1966, the organization turned toward advocating
black powerBlack Power is a political slogan and a name for various associated ideologies. It is used in the movement among people of Black African descent throughout the world, primarily African Americans in the United States...
. A disillusioned Moses quit the group. He then temporarily changed his name to Bob Parris and moved to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft. After getting remarried, Moses moved to Eastern Africa. From 1969-1975, Moses worked as a teacher in
TanzaniaThe United Republic of Tanzania is a country in central East Africa bordered by Kenya and Uganda to the north, Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west, and Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique to the south. The country's eastern borders lie on the Indian Ocean.The United...
. In 1976 he returned to Harvard and completed a doctorate in philosophy, after which he taught high school math in
Cambridge, MassachusettsCambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, a nexus of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Notably, Cambridge is home to two internationally prominent...
.
Algebra Project
In 1982 he received a
MacArthur FellowshipThe John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a major grant-making private foundation based in Chicago that has awarded more than US$4 billion since its inception in 1978...
, and used the money to create the
Algebra ProjectThe Algebra Project is a national U.S. mathematics literacy effort aimed at helping low-income students and students of color successfully achieve mathematical skills that are a prerequisite for a college preparatory mathematics sequence in high school...
, a foundation devoted to improving minority education in math. Moses taught math for a time at Lanier High School in
Jackson, MississippiJackson is the capital and the most populous city of the U.S. state of Mississippi. It is one of two county seats of Hinds County , but the city also contains areas in Madison and Rankin Counties...
, and used the school as a
laboratory schoolFor the school located at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, see Louisiana State University Laboratory School
For the school located at Tarlac City, Philippines, see Laboratory School ...
for
Algebra ProjectThe Algebra Project is a national U.S. mathematics literacy effort aimed at helping low-income students and students of color successfully achieve mathematical skills that are a prerequisite for a college preparatory mathematics sequence in high school...
methods.
In 2005, Moses was selected as one of twelve inaugural Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellows by the
Fletcher FoundationThe Fletcher Foundation is a nonprofit foundation that supports civil rights and environmental education. It was created with a $50 million endowment in 2004 by New York financier and philanthropist Alphonse Fletcher, Jr....
, which awards substantial grants to scholars and activists working on civil rights issues. In 2006, Moses was named a
Frank H.T. RhodesFrank Harold Trevor Rhodes was the ninth president of Cornell University from 1977 to 1995.Rhodes was born in Warwickshire, England on October 29, 1926. He attended the University of Birmingham, graduating in 1948 with a Bachelor of Science degree...
Class of '56 Professor at
Cornell UniversityCornell University is a private university located in Ithaca, New York, USA, that is a member of the Ivy League.Cornell counts more than 255,000 living alumni, 28 Rhodes Scholars and 41 Nobel laureates affiliated with the university as faculty or students...
.
Honors
- War Resisters League Peace Award
Since 1958, the "War Resisters League", the pacifist group founded in 1923, has awarded almost annually its War Resisters League Peace Award to a person or organization whose work represents the League's radical nonviolent program of Gandhian action....
(1997)
- The 6th Annual Heinz Award
The Heinz Award is an award administered annually to five honorees by the Heinz Family Foundation. The Heinz Awards recognize outstanding individuals for their contributions in the five areas of: Arts and Humanities, the Environment, the Human Condition, Public Policy, and Technology, the Economy...
in the Human Condition (2000)
- The Nation/Puffin Prize for Creative Citizenship (2001)
- The Mary Chase Smith Award for American Democracy (2002)
- The James Bryant Conant Award from the Education Commission of the States (2002)
- Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship (2005)
- Honorary Degree, Swarthmore College (2007)
Books
- Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project ISBN 0-8070-3127-5
External links