Robert Parris Moses, famous activist of the civil rights movement in the United States, died Sunday, July 25, at the age of 86. The one everyone called “Bob” worked to end segregation as the local director in Mississippi of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) – one of the main bodies of the African American rights movement. civics in the 1960s.
He notably played a central role in the Freedom Summer campaign in 1964, in which hundreds of students from the North traveled to the South with activists in Mississippi to help them find their way. register African Americans on electoral rolls and promote civil rights statewide.
“Bob Moses was one of my heroes. His quiet confidence has helped shape the civil rights movement, and he has inspired generations of young people who seek to make a difference ”said former President Barack Obama on Twitter.
“We were all on the verge of being killed”
Robert Parris Moses was born in New York City, in the Harlem neighborhood, on January 23, 1935. His grandfather, William Henry Moses, was a prominent Southern Baptist preacher and a supporter of Marcus Garvey, a black nationalist leader of the early 1900s. century.
Like many black families, the Moses family had left the South to settle in the North during the African-American “Great Migration”. Once in Harlem, she sold milk from a black cooperative, according to Laura Visser-Maessen’s book, Robert Parris Moses: A life in civil rights and leadership at the grassroots (The University of North Carolina Press, May 2016).
In 1960, Robert Moses went to the South and became secretary of the SNCC. The young civil rights activist is trying to get black people on the electoral roll in rural Amite County, Mississippi, where he is attacked and arrested. He files a complaint against his white attacker, who will be acquitted by an all-white jury.
In 1963, he and two other activists, James Travis and Randolph Blackwell, were driving in Greenwood, Mississippi, when someone opened fire on them and touched 20-year-old James Travis. “We were all on the verge of being killed”, he then reported in a statement.
In 1964, in addition to the Freedom Summer campaign, he was one of the main founders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a group of Democratic candidates who challenge the Mississippi all-white delegation at the party’s national convention.
Robert Moses then worked as a teacher in Tanzania, before returning to Harvard to obtain a doctorate in philosophy. He then taught mathematics in high school in Cambridge (Massachusetts), then in Jackson (Mississippi).
In 1982, he founded the Algebra Project thanks to the scholarship program of the MacArthur Foundation – a grant awarded each year to about thirty Americans deemed intelligent, creative, motivated and doing important work – to improve the mathematical knowledge of underprivileged populations. . He saw this project as a continuation of the civil rights struggle he had led in the 1960s. “Giving hope to young people through access to the culture of mathematics was for him an issue of citizenship, as essential as that of the right to vote”, according to Ben Moynihan of Project Algebra.
