Civil Rights Activist Bob Moses Dies At 86

Robert Parris Moses, a civil rights activist who was shot at and endured beatings and jail while leading Black voter registration drives in the American South during the 1960s and later helped improve minority education in math, has died.

Moses, who was widely referred to as Bob, worked to dismantle segregation as the Mississippi field director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement and was central to the 1964 "Freedom Summer" in which hundreds of students went to the South to register voters.

Once in Harlem, his family sold milk from a Black-owned cooperative to help supplement the household income, according to Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots, by Laura Visser-Maessen.

A reoccurring theme in Moses' life and work was the need to listen and work with the local populations where activists were trying to affect change whether that was registering Black voters in some of the most staunchly anti-integration parts of Mississippi or years later working with students and teachers to come up with ways to improve math knowledge.

In an interview with the National Visionary Leadership Project, he talked about the need for civil rights workers to earn the trust of the local population in Mississippi in order to effect change.

Disillusioned with white liberal reaction to the civil rights movement, Moses soon began taking part in demonstrations against the Vietnam War then cut off all relationships with whites, even former SNCC members.

The press-shy Moses started his "second chapter in civil rights work" by founding in 1982 the Algebra Project using money he received through the MacArthur Foundation Fellows program — often referred to as "genius" grants — to improve math literacy among underserved populations

Ben Moynihan from the Algebra Project said Moses saw the work of improving mathematics literacy as an extension of the civil rights work he had started in the 1960s

"Aside from having attracted the same sort of adoration among young people in the movement that Martin Luther King did in adults," Branch said, "Moses represented a separate conception of leadership" as arising from and being carried on by "ordinary people."