Ben Moynihan was the Algebra Project's director of operations. He said that he spoke with Janet Moses, Moses' wife, and that her husband had died in Hollywood, Florida, Sunday morning. The cause of death was not disclosed.Moses was born in Harlem (New York) on January 23, 1935. This was two months after Harlem's race riot that left three people dead and 60 injured. His grandfather William Henry Moses was a prominent Southern Baptist preacher who supported Marcus Garvey (a Black nationalist leader at this time) during his childhood.The Moses family, like many Black families, moved from the South to the North during the Great Migration. Robert Parris Moses: A life in civil rights and leadership at the Grassroots by Laura Visser–Maessen.He was a Rhodes Scholar while attending Hamilton College in Clinton (New York) and was greatly influenced by the ideas of French philosopher Albert Camus. Moses was then sponsored by Quakers to travel to Europe. This trip solidified his belief that change comes from the bottom, and he went on to earn a masters of philosophy at Harvard University.Moses did not spend much time in South Carolina until he went on an exploratory trip in 1960 to see it for himself. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Atlanta. But he found very little activity and quickly turned his attention towards SNCC.Moses later stated that Moses taught me about the denial to the right of Europeans to vote behind the Iron Curtain. I didn't know that the United States had a Cotton Curtain that denied the right to vote.He tried to register Black voters in Mississippi's rural Amite County, but was attacked and then arrested. An all-white jury cleared him of the charges and Moses was granted protection at the county line.He was 20 years old when Randolph Blackwell and James Travis, two activists, opened fire on them in Greenwood, Mississippi. Moses, in a press release by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee described how bullets flew around him and how Moses took control of the car when Travis was struck.Moses stated in 1963 that we were all within inches of being murdered.Moses' life and work had a recurring theme of listening and working with local communities to effect change. This could be registering Black voters in Mississippi's most anti-integration areas or years later working with teachers and students to improve math knowledge.He spoke with the National Visionary Leadership Project about how civil rights workers must earn the trust and support of Mississippians to bring about change.You had to prove that the Black population of Mississippi was willing to work with your efforts.Later, he helped to organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. This party sought to oppose the all-white Democratic delegation that came from Mississippi in 1964. However, President Lyndon Johnson stopped the rebel Democrats from voting at the convention. Instead, he allowed Jim Crow southerners to remain, drawing national attention.Moses became disillusioned by the white liberal response to the civil rights movement and soon started participating in protests against Vietnam War. After this, all relations with whites, including former SNCC members, were cut off.Moses was a teacher in Tanzania. He returned to Harvard to get a doctorate of philosophy. After teaching high school math in Cambridge (Massachusetts), he taught mathematics to students in the secondary grades. Later, he taught math in Jackson (Mississippi), while traveling back and forth between Massachusetts and Mississippi on weekends.Moses, a press-shy man, started his second chapter of civil rights work in 1982 when he founded the Algebra Project with money he received from the MacArthur Foundation Fellows program. This grant was often called genius grants and it helped to improve math literacy among the underserved. Ben Moynihan, Algebra Project, said that Moses saw the work to improve mathematics literacy as an extension and continuation of civil rights work he started in the 1960s.Bob saw the issue of providing hope for young people by accessing mathematics literacy ...., Moynihan stated, as a citizenship issue as important as the right vote.Taylor Branch, historian, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Parting the Waters, stated that Moses' leadership was a paradox.Branch stated that Moses was not only able to attract the same kind of adoration from young people as Martin Luther King in adults but also represented a distinct conception of leadership, which is based on ordinary people.
