One of the most influential leaders in the civil rights movement, Robert Parris Moses was born on January 23, 1935 in New York City’s Harlem two months after a race riot left three dead and injured 60 in the neighborhood. The son of a janitor, Moses grew up in a Harlem housing project but received a high-quality public education, which he turned into a productive, meaningful career. Bob Moses graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1952. He then enrolled at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where he was one of three African American students. During his college years he spent summers in France among pacifists who had survived Hitler’s occupation, and lived in Japan, exploring his interests in pacifism and Eastern philosophy.
Moses received his B.A. degree from Hamilton College in 1956. On the road to continue furthering his education, he transferred to Harvard to work on a Ph.D. in philosophy. His time at Harvard was cut short after the death of his mother and his father being sick. To pay for his father’s care, he became a mathematics teacher at Horace Mann, a prestigious private high school. During the late 1950s Moses became increasingly interested in the civil rights struggle. In 1959 he helped Bayard Rustin with the second Youth March for Integrated Schools in Washington, D.C. While in Virginia visiting an uncle, William Moses, a Hampton Institute faculty member, Bob Moses joined a Newport News picket line, where he met Wyatt T. Walker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
In 1960, he became active in the Civil Rights Movement, joining the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) branch in Harlem. The following summer, Moses traveled to Atlanta work with the organization’s Ella Baker and Jane Stembridge. Stembridge invited Moses to go to Mississippi to recruit student participants for a special conference of civil rights activists. The conference resulted in the development of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC). This new organization, more democratic in nature and less hierarchical and preacher-dominated than the SCLC, had been created to recruit and train students as nonviolent civil rights demonstrators. In his spare time, he joined the picket lines outside Atlanta supermarkets that refused to hire Black clerks. When Stembridge suggested he undertake a recruiting trip throughout the deep South as an SNCC field representative, he quickly volunteered.
SNCC’s voter registration efforts began when Bob Moses met the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) president of a local branch, Amzie Moore, one of the people Miss Baker had put him in contact with. When he first arrived in Mississippi in the summer of 1960, there was no student movement in the state. Moses was sent by Ella Baker to find students from the Deep South to participate in a SNCC conference that October in Atlanta. As an organizer, he was heavily influenced by Ella Baker, who believed civil rights movements should belong to the people, not to the leaders. In order to put victory in the hands of citizens, she believed, organizers should stay in the background, developing trust in communities, helping people define what they want, and then guiding them to their goals. Working with Moore, Bob Moses soon developed a plan to begin registering Black Mississippians to vote.
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. The young civil rights advocate tried to register Black people to vote in Mississippi's rural Amite County where he was beaten and arrested. 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. Moses faced nearly relentless violence and official intimidation and was beaten and arrested in Amite County. When he tried to file charges against a White assailant, an all-White jury acquitted the man and a judge provided protection to Moses to the county line so he could leave. By pressing charges against his assailant, despite a quick acquittal, Moses further demonstrated his policy of quiet perseverance.
That same spring of 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) began its Freedom Rides in order to test the previous year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Boynton v. Virginia that required the desegregation of facilities used in interstate travel. Two buses with anti-segregation volunteers left Washington, D.C., only to encounter increasing antagonism and violence the further south they traveled. One of the buses was attacked and burned near Anniston, Alabama, while riders on the other were beaten in nearby Birmingham. CORE was going abandon the trip because of the violence, but in response, SNCC students activists, from Nashville, including Diane Nash, joined the original riders as one bus continued to Jackson, Mississippi. Everyone aboard that bus was jailed.
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." The student sit-ins in the South had begun just a few months earlier. “The sits-in woke me up,” recalled Moses. Amzie Moore told Moses that he wanted to use the energy of the student activists in SNCC for voter registration. Moore decided to attend the October conference and placed the idea of voter registration on SNCC’s table. The following summer, Moses returned to the Magnolia State with a team of SNCC workers. Moore, sent him to his NAACP colleague, C.C. Bryant, in McComb. There, with other local community leaders, Bob Moses began SNCC’s first voter registration organizing effort. Moses nurtured the development of local grassroots leaders, and he recognized the untapped potential power and unheard voice of locals who spoke up at the meetings.
Throughout the winter of 1961 and into 1962, Moses continued his work among the rural poor, rarely leaving Mississippi. Exhibiting almost mystical calm amidst the terrible violence and constant harassment, the soft-spoken Moses was becoming a legend. In addition, he survived a vicious attack by a police dog outside the Greenwood City Hall and a highway ambush that riddled his car with machine-gun fire and wounded a fellow SNCC worker. Despite his work and determined presence, by the spring of 1963, only 6,700 of the more than 60,000 Black Mississippians who had made the attempt to vote had been registered. Moses began to realize that only the federal government confronting Mississippi and enforcing national voting rights laws would initiate greater progress.
Moses then became the co-director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a cooperative of civil rights groups in the state. Civil rights groups such as SNCC, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), NAACP, SCLC, all work together to achieve a goal. A major leader with SNCC, he was the main organizer of COFO's Freedom Summer Project, which was intended to achieve widespread voter registration of African Americans in Mississippi, and ultimately end racial disfranchisement. They planned education, organizing, and a simplified registration system to demonstrate African-American desire to vote. Moses was one of the calm leaders who kept the group focused. The murder of Medgar Evers, Mississippi’s NAACP field secretary, in June of 1963 shocked the country, bringing national attention to the state. This is not what the folks of Mississippi wanted, but a more publicized event was about to happen, that would wake the nation.
On June 21st 1964, as many of the new volunteers were getting settled and trained in nonviolent resistance, three were murdered: James Chaney, a local African American, and his two co-leaders Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, both from New York City. The remaining volunteers were frightened, and Moses gathered them together to discuss the risks they faced. He said that now that they had seen first-hand what could happen, they had every right to go home, and no one would blame them for leaving. This was not the first murder of activists in the South, but the Civil Rights Movement had attracted increasing notice from the national media. The volunteers struggled with the idea of nonviolence, of Blacks and Whites working together, and related issues. Moses's leadership was a major cohesive factor for a number of volunteers staying.
By example and through his soft-spoken leadership style, Moses encouraged activists to listen to other people and to become part of communities they wanted to help. He said that Black Mississippians had spent much of their lives having wealthier, more educated people tell them what to do, and he did not want civil rights activists, no matter how well-meaning, to do the same. Moses advocated nonviolent protest, spoke highly of the potential of freedom schools to set examples for new ideas about education, and above all promoted a creative, participatory approach to community life. Moses, along with Fannie Lou Hamer, developed the idea for the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. The project which recruited northern college students to join Mississippi Blacks conducting a grassroots voter registration drive. Moses’s final effort that summer was in the political arena.
Later that year, Moses and Ms. Hamer, founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the all-White Democratic state delegation. At the Democratic party’s national presidential convention that August, President Lyndon Johnson prevented the rebels from voting in the national convention and let Jim Crow southerners remain, drawing national attention. Although the MFDP didn’t win any seats, they forced the integration of the mainstream Democratic Party. They also brought representation to people who were usually ignored because of racism, class, and poverty. Fannie Lou Hamer, who later became the voice and face of the MFDP, was one of the delegates. Greatly disillusioned with the continuing violence and growing factionalism between African Americans and Whites in the civil rights movement, Moses wearied from the struggle resigned from COFO in December 1964.
Bob Moses temporarily dropped his surname, going by his middle name, Parris. In 1965 Moses left Mississippi and began participating in the campaign against the Vietnam War. Following a trip to Africa in 1965, Moses became disillusioned with White liberal reaction to the civil-rights movement, he began cutting off all relationships with Whites, even former SNCC members. Shortly after, Moses was actively recruited by the Vietnam draft board, but moved to Canada to avoid the draft. He was five years too old for the age cutoff and he suspected the intervention of government agents. He spent two years in Canada before moving to Tanzania, where he and his wife Janet lived for several years, having three of their four children, while teaching math and working for the Ministry of Education.
Moses returned to the United States in 1976, under President Jimmy Carter’s amnesty program for draft resisters. In 1982, completing his PhD at Harvard, Moses received a MacArthur Fellowship, and launched the Algebra Project to improve mathematics competency for low-income students and children of color. The Algebra Project has worked with tens of thousands of students across the United States. By 1985, the Algebra Project was officially recognized by the Cambridge School Committee, and was incorporated in 1990. In 2001, Moses and fellow activist and journalist Charles E. Cobb Jr. published Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project, about Moses's life and work in civil rights and education. Additional awards and honors include an Essence Award (1997); the War Resisters League Peace Award (1997); and numerous honorary doctorates, including one from both his alma maters, Hamilton College (1991) and Harvard University (2006). In 2006, Moses was named a Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of ’56 Professor at Cornell University.