Robert Moses prominent US civil rights activist dies at 86

Robert Parris Moses, a civil rights activist who 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. He was 86.

Moses 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.

He started his "second chapter in civil rights work" by founding in 1982 the Algebra Project thanks to a MacArthur Fellowship. The project included a curriculum Moses developed to help poor students succeed in math.

Ben Moynihan, director of operations for the Algebra Project, said he had talked with Moses's wife, Dr. Janet Moses, and she said her husband had died Sunday morning in Hollywood, Fla. Information was not given as to the cause of death.

Moses was born in Harlem, in New York City, on Jan. 23, 1935, two months after a race riot left three dead and injured 60 in the neighbourhood. His grandfather, William Henry Moses, was a prominent Southern Baptist preacher and a supporter of Marcus Garvey, a Black nationalist leader at the turn of the century.

"When people asked what to do, he asked them what they thought. At meetings, he usually sat in the back and spoke last. He slept on floors, wore overalls, shared the risks, took the blows, he dug in deeply." - Tom Hayden on Bob Moses, who has journeyed home and who loved us so. <a href="https://t.co/xOYioFKHmO">pic.twitter.com/xOYioFKHmO</a>

&mdash;@ava

But like many Black families, the Moses family moved north from the South during the Great Migration. Once in Harlem, his family sold milk from a Black-owned co-operative 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.

While attending Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., he became a Rhodes Scholar and was deeply influenced by the work of French philosopher Albert Camus and his ideas of rationality and moral purity for social change. Moses then took part in a Quaker-sponsored trip to Europe and solidified his beliefs that change came from the bottom up, before earning a master's in philosophy at Harvard University.

Moses didn't spend much time in the Deep South until he went on a recruiting trip in 1960 to "see the movement for myself." He sought out Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta but found little activity in the office and soon turned his attention to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

"I was taught about the denial of the right to vote behind the Iron Curtain in Europe," Moses later said. "I never knew that there was [the] denial of the right to vote behind a Cotton Curtain here in the United States."

The young civil rights advocate tried to register Blacks to vote in Mississippi's rural Amite County, where he was beaten and arrested. 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.

We have lost one of the most courageous organizers of our time. As a Field organizer for SNCC, Bob Moses was the architect of the Mississippi Freedom Project, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Algebra Project. <br><br>Rest in Power, Bob Moses <a href="https://t.co/tnUQ1fKXLO">pic.twitter.com/tnUQ1fKXLO</a>

&mdash;@zellieimani

Moses later helped to organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which sought to challenge the all-white Democratic delegation from Mississippi. But then-president Lyndon Johnson prevented the group of rebel Democrats from voting at the convention and instead let Jim Crow southerners remain, drawing national attention.

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.

Moses worked as a teacher in Tanzania, returned to Harvard University to earn a doctorate in philosophy and taught high school math in Cambridge, Mass.

My dearest brother Bob Moses â€" spiritual genius, intellectual giant and moral titan â€" has left us! Words fall short! He was larger than life and one of the great exemplars of our humanity! Let us never forget him!

&mdash;@CornelWest

Later in life, the press-shy Moses started his "second chapter in civil rights work" by founding in 1982 the Algebra Project.

Historian Taylor Branch, whose Parting the Waters won the Pulitzer Prize, said Moses's leadership embodied a paradox.

"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."

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