Robert Parris Moses
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Robert Parris Moses (born Harlem, New York, January 23, 1935, usually known as Bob Moses) is an American Harvard-trained educator who joined the civil rights movement and later founded the nationwide US Algebra project.
Moses received his B.A. from Hamilton College in 1956. He studied philosophy at Harvard, and obtained a teaching certificate and taught at the Horace Mann School in Manhattan from 1958.
He began working with civil rights activists in 1960, becoming field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). As director of the SNCC's Mississippi Project. Moses and other leaders traveled to the South themselves and demanded federal protection from the John F. Kennedy administration. After this he became committed to the cause and quit his teaching job. Bob Moses, as some think, helped to organize the freedom riders who traveled across the South, did not help to organize this movement. His presence during this time did warrant him such a title but he was not directly involved.
By 1964 Moses had become Co-Director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), an umbrella organization for all the major civil rights groups then working in Mississippi, and a leading SNCC figure. Moses was a main organizer of COFO's Freedom Summer project, which was intended to end racial disenfranchisement by voter registration, under legal restrictions which made it nearly impossible for black citizens to qualify to vote. Moses was instrumental in the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a faction of the Democratic Party that tried to challenge the regulars at the party's 1964 convention.
When Stokely Carmichael became SNCC president in 1966, the organization turned toward advocating black power, and a disillusioned Moses quit the group. From 1969-1975, Moses worked as a teacher in Tanzania. In 1976 he returned to Harvard, and completed a doctorate in philosophy, after which he taught high school math in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1982 he received a MacArthur Fellowship, and used the money to create the Algebra project, a foundation devoted to improving minority education in math. Moses now teaches math at Lanier High School in Jackson, Mississippi, which he uses as a laboratory school for Algebra project methods.
In 2005, Moses was selected as one of twelve inaugural Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellows by the Fletcher Foundation, which awards substantial grants to scholars and activists working on civil rights issues. [1] In 2006, Moses was named a Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of '56 Professor at Cornell University.[1]
[edit] Honors
- War Resisters League Peace Award (1997)
- Heinz Award for 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)
[edit] Books
- Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project ISBN 0-8070-3127-5
