I often wondered how someone as gentle as Robert “Bob” Moses could be so powerful. We don’t usually associate power with gentleness. Yet, Moses was one of the most gentle, kind, and soft-spoken persons I ever met. Leaders, especially Civil Rights leaders, are traditionally fiery not tranquil. It took me a moment to realize that determination can be both fiery and tranquil, especially when determination is overlaid and guided by love. But, for Moses, love was not an attempt to placate white folks. As Moses told Southern writer Robert Penn Warren during an interview for Who Speaks for the Negro?, the majority of members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) did not agree with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, philosophy that “they have to somehow love the white people that they are struggling against.” For Moses, love is the natural energy of the universe, like light, that is perpetually working and expanding to create beauty through order, harmony, and justice. Thus, love is no respecter of person; yet, it willingly feeds and serves all who have the capacity to be just. Moreover, the inner peace of morality, of longsuffering, of seeing the humanity in all peoples, and of knowing that hatred is a cancer that kills human beings one cell at a time is what fueled Moses’ gentleness. In my twenty-plus years of knowing Moses, I never heard him raise his voice; yet, I witnessed him command a room with a love powerful enough to baptize us all. I saw all types of people go silent in awe for what he’d done, what he was doing, and what he was going to do because he was always in the process of teaching us how to love/live better today than we loved/lived yesterday. However, for Moses, love is a plan. Love is an action verb. Love is critical thinking. Love is loving yourself enough to force others to love you. Love is not fearful. Love is not pride. Love is not turf wars. Love does not desire to be the center of attention. Love is not a resume bullet point. Love is not status. Love is not working to have white folks think highly of you. Love is not lust. Love is not avarice. Love is justice. For Bob Moses, love is justice. And, his achievements with SNCC, the Algebra Project, and the future fruits of his work all prove that innate to love are critical thinking, deliberate action, and diligence. As such, his life is a blueprint for black folks to liberate themselves from white supremacy (police brutality, discriminatory hiring and promotion practices, discriminatory housing practices, discriminatory education policies, voter suppression, discriminatory charging and sentencing, and more) by using their own resources and by forming alliances with others who can help but not dictate the goals and methodology of black sovereignty.
Moses was inspired to get involved in the Movement because he saw a group of North Carolina A&T University students sitting-in a Woolworth in 1960 demanding to be served, and he thought to himself, “They look like I feel.” That picture was worth much more than a thousand words, the image of those students illuminated the pride, anger, frustration, and resolve that burned in Moses, sparking him into action. By then, Moses had already earned a BA in philosophy and French while playing basketball at Hamilton College and an MA in philosophy at Harvard. But, his mother’s death and father’s illness caused him to leave his PhD program and return home to New York City. It was during this time that Moses became a tutor for Frankie Lymon of the Teenagers and was introduced to African-American towns and communities across the nation. This experience exposed him to the segregated yet well-ordered African-American lives that shared a common history and culture. It affirmed the beauty and cultural power of black folks and Moses came to understand they just needed to be given the tools to do nationally what black folks had been doing locally for years—surviving by turning hell into livable. The combination of his family upbringing, deep reading, brief Quaker service trips to Europe, and his time criss-crossing the country with Lymon confirmed for Moses that black folks had all the leaders they needed. They just needed to be taught to see themselves as their own liberators. Thus, regardless of his work or organization, the core of Moses’ organizing remained teaching black folks how to free themselves.
He initially began in 1960 by traveling to Atlanta, Georgia, to work with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), but there was little grassroots work being done there. Similarly, the NAACP didn’t appeal much to Moses either because the bulk of their work was litigation, not direct action. To be clear, many members of the NAACP were involved in direct action, but it was usually in connection or collaboration with other organizations. Then, in 1960, Moses became a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and went to Cleveland, Mississippi, to work with NAACP veteran Amzie Moore who actually put voter registration on SNCC’s agenda. Black folks in Cleveland, though, were not ready for a mass movement so Moore connected Moses with another NAACP veteran Curtis Conway “C. C.” Bryant in McComb, Mississippi, and that’s when they started moving mountains as Moses met two young men, Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes, who were eager to work. Under Moses’ leadership and with help from too many folks to name, such as the great strategist Ella Baker, SNCC developed two programs of work: direct action led by Diane Nash and Marion Barry and voter registration led by Moses (which included greats such as Fannie Lou Hamer). This dual-threat combatted the 20th Century confederacy of Mississippi and the South, eventually bringing Jim Crow to its knees with the help of non-violent soldiers such as Dorie and Joyce Lander, Vernon Dahmer, and Clyde Kennard, just to name a few. But, the sacrifice was great, as Moses and others were brutally beaten, while others were killed. In 1963, Moses, Jimmy Travis, and Randolph Blackwell were driving from Greenwood, Mississippi, when shots were fired into their vehicle, hitting Travis who was hospitalized. He survived but many did not, including Dahmer, Kennard, and fifty-six-year-old farmer Herbert Lee who was killed by a white state legislator E. H. Hurst in front of several witnesses for attending a voter registration class organized by Moses. Predictably, Hurst was cleared of all charges by an all-white jury. While these types of assaults and killings were normal, the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in 1964 impacted the nation in a way that only the 1955 murder of Emmet Till had previously. In the face of this type of terror, Moses became the first African American to file assault charges against a white person. Of course, the white person was acquitted of the charges, but Moses’ actions sent a message to blacks and whites that a new day was dawning in which fear would no longer stop black progress. Simultaneously, Moses was helping to organize the 1964 Freedom Summer Project and co-founded the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), which served as the umbrella group that enabled SNCC, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), NAACP, and SCLC to work collectively on the Freedom Summer Project. Moses and others were also organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which challenged the all-white regular Democratic Party delegates from Mississippi at the party’s 1964 national convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Because the Democratic Regulars had for decades excluded African Americans from the political process in Mississippi, the MFDP wanted their elected delegates seated at the convention. Their challenge brought national media coverage to the Civil Rights struggle in the state, with one of the highlights being Hamer’s famed “I Question America” speech. (Four months later, Hamer would give her noted “I’m Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired” speech in Harlem, NY, with Malcolm X aka el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz.) The rise of Hamer from a sharecropper to a major Civil Rights voice illustrated Moses’ and SNCC’s method of helping everyday people become the voices and policymakers of their movement.
Unfortunately, in 1966, Moses—a conscientious objector to the War in Viet Nam—was forced to flee the country after he was notified by the Selective Service that his number had come up even though he was five years past the age cutoff for the draft. Living in Canada and Tanzania for close to ten years, Moses returned to America in 1977,after Jimmy Carter pardoned Americans who’d evaded the draft during the Viet Nam War, and pursued graduate work in the philosophy of mathematics at Harvard.
Appalled by his daughter Maisha’s poor grounding in grade-school math, he began to pay close attention to math teaching in local public schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That, in turn, led him to found the Algebra Project, which melds math education with critical thinking, social awareness, and activism to give the poorest children (with the traditionally lowest math scores) the tools needed to change their circumstances. By 1982 Moses had gone back south where he taught Algebra at Lanier High School in Jackson, MS. The AP was meant to dismantle what Moses called “sharecropper education,” in which black folks were educated just enough to serve as unskilled laborers at the bottom of a white supremacist caste structure. He argued that Algebra is a critical “gatekeeper” subject because mastering it is necessary for middle school students to advance in math, technology, and science; attending college is difficult without Algebra and entering the STEM-based world of the 21st Century Information economy is impossible. I take Moses points personally since my sister, Dr. Elizabeth McInnis, who has a PhD in educational technology, is a product of the Algebra Project. According to Diane Cole’s “The Civil Right to Radical Math”:
At Lanier High School (Jackson, Mississippi), 55 percent of the students in the Algebra Project’s curriculum passed the state exam on the first try, compared to 40 percent of students taught with the regular curriculum. More students at junior high school sites who followed the Algebra Project curriculum scored higher on standardized tests and continued to more advanced math classes than did their schoolmates who followed standard curriculum.
Moses continued to inspire the Young People’s Project (YPP), which features local artists and educators, such as Jolivette Anderson aka The Poet Warrior, to help engage students in their learning process. YPP uses math literacy as a tool to develop young leaders and organizers who radically change the quality of education and quality of life in their communities so that all children have the opportunity to reach their full human potential. Per Cole: “At its peak, the Algebra Project has provided help to roughly forty-thousand minority students each year. Contributions include curricula guides for kindergarten through high school, the training of teachers, and peer coaching.” Everyone should read Moses’ Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project, which can be purchased here.
While my Pops knew and had crossed paths with Moses, it was only after meeting Anderson and then local community activist Derrick Johnson in 1996 that I worked on various events and programs coordinated by Moses. To be honest, had it not been for Anderson and Johnson, I probably wouldn’t have done much community work. Other than teaching creative writing at the juvenile youth court center where my Pops was the senior counselor and forced me to do it because “he said so,” much of my local community work comes through my relationship with Southern Echo, YPP/Algebra Project, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and the Nation of Islam. Half that work is connected to institutions founded by Moses.
It is easy to be overly general and sweeping in our remembrances of large historical figures. In my case, I find myself tempted to squeeze Moses’s legacy into the often simplistic distinction between SNCC—grassroots organization of the people—and the NAACP—a more bureaucratic, top-down organization. Yet Moses (associated with SNCC) and Medgar Evers (associated with NAACP) were so intelligent and so loving that they defied that duality. As such, both were courageous foot soldiers who had the minds of generals. As leaders, neither ever asked anyone to do something that they had not already done. When Moses told people to be prepared to go to jail, he had already beenthere. When Moses asked folks to be good students, it was because he had already mastered Civil Rights militancy. And, Moses, like Evers, shined most in his ability to connect with, inspire, and teach common folks how to lead their own movement. Unfortunately for Evers, while the local NAACP branches have always been and remained powerful, for years the organization’s national leadership was disconnected from their local branches. Thankfully, the current CEO of the NAACP, Derrick Johnson (the same aforementioned former community activist), has worked to support and strengthen local branches. That’s because Johnson is fruit from the Moses tree by way of Hollis Watkins, former SNCC Field Secretary from McComb who later co-founded Southern Echo with former SNCC Attorney Mike Sayer and local activist Leroy Johnson. That trio mentored Derrick Johnson, along with Brenda Hyde and Nsombi Lambright, prepping them to cultivate the next generation of community organizers and leaders. Thus, through D. Johnson (and others), Moses’ grassroots legacy will flourish as D. Johnson has directed the NACCP to pay it forward by investing in the local branches and Youth Chapters, and by founding Mississippi Black Leadership Institute (MBLI) as another way to develop local leaders beholden to black people, not white money. Additionally, Brenda Hyde continues to hold a leadership role in Southern Echo and Nsombi Lambright became the first African-American woman to lead a state ACLU chapter before taking the leadership position of One Voice Mississippi, showing that the fruits from the Moses tree continue to ripen. Furthermore, this is an occasion to note that one of Mississippi’s brightest young activists is Mac Epps who co-founded Mississippi M.O.V.E. and was a high school trainee for Southern Echo.
When my Pops died, neither I nor any of my siblings did any prolonged crying or grieving because he had given us all that a father could give his children. We are left with wonderful memories and lessons that motivate and comfort us even in his absence. Bob Moses gave all that a leader in the struggle for love and justice can give. He taught us how to love ourselves. He taught how to see greatness in common people. He taught students how to teach others. He taught how to organize. He taught the difference between organization and mobilization. He taught people not to quit. He taught them how to work with others with whom they may not always agree. He taught how to part in love. He taught how to listen to others. He taught how to be present for oneself and for others. He taught how to disagree without being disagreeable. He taught how to stand alone, how to stand with others, and how to know when you must choose to do one or the other. He taught that no force is greater than the trinity of self-love, determination, and diligence. Ultimately, he taught that love is greater than hate and that black people are a beautiful and powerful mosaic that makes life beautiful and powerful.