The Sum of Robert Moses

The sum of Robert Moses
Algebra Project founder sees education as the new civil rights struggle
By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff, 3/8/2001

      CAMBRIDGE - Back in the '60s, when he was organizing for the Student
      Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi, Robert P. Moses was
      asked how he went about his work. ''You stand on a street and bounce a
      ball,'' he said. ''Soon all the children come around. You keep on bouncing
      the ball. Before long it runs under someone's porch, and then you meet the
      adults.''

      Twenty years later, Moses began the Algebra Project, a program that has
      won national acclaim for preparing students in largely rural and
      inner-city communities to take college-prep mathematics. He's no longer
      worried about meeting the adults, but the way he went about organizing in
      the Delta exemplifies his approach to education as well as civil rights.
      For him, the two are essentially the same thing.

      It's an approach that made Moses, 66, a legend in the movement. Other SNCC
      people became more famous: Stokely Carmichael, say, as a black power
      advocate, or John Lewis as a Georgia congressman. Moses's renown was of a
      different order. ''He was the only one that had a kind of mystique,'' says
      Taylor Branch, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history ''Parting the
      Waters: America in the King Years.'' ''He was venerated.''

      That same organizing approach - basic, unexpected, inspired - has shaped
      the Algebra Project. ''I could see when I met him, it was clear, he had a
      vision,'' says Frank Davis, director of the PhD Program in Educational
      Studies at Lesley University. ''He had some ideas about getting there I'd
      never heard before - and I've spent my professional life working with just
      these issues.''

      In 1982, the project consisted of Moses tutoring his daughter and three
      eighth-grade classmates at Cambridge's King Open School. Today, it has a
      budget of $2.5 million and reaches 10,000 students in 28 communities in 10
      states.

      One of those states is Mississippi. Every Monday, Moses flies out of Logan
      to the state's capital, Jackson, via Cincinnati. There he teaches three
      math classes a day from Tuesday to Friday. Between wintry weather and
      flight delays, the trip can take more than seven hours. Why bother?
      ''It's the only theater where we can raise education reform as a civil
      rights issue,'' Moses says, sitting in the project's spartan offices in
      Central Square. ''We are fighting another twist of the same struggle as to
      how black people can move on to realize freedom. In the '60s, we seized on
      the right to vote in Mississippi and organized blacks for political
      access, and eventually that came about. So today we are seizing on math
      literacy as a tool of organizing economic access.''

      From Miss. to Math
      Moses describes the path he took from Mississippi to mathematics and back
      in a new book, ''Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights.''
      A deeply reflective man, Moses is at once unemphatic and unequivocal. He
      tends to look to the side or at the floor while talking and speaks in a
      soft, unhurried voice. The words come out not so much slowly as
      inexorably: a clear mountain stream that meanders but will not be dammed.
      As he speaks, Moses communicates a sense of real concentration - as if
      each word has been pondered before he pronounces it, and that it's being
      uttered for the first time. It's a manner better suited to a philosophy
      seminar than a protest rally, but that's in keeping with both Moses'
      character and background.

      Seen in biographical terms, Moses' journey from getting people into the
      voting booth to getting them into math class appears inevitable rather
      than incongruous, and his ostensibly radical equating of math literacy and
      civil rights isn't radical at all. In a sense, it has brought his career
      full circle.

      Born and raised in Harlem, Moses demonstrated an intellectual bent early
      on. He also received from his parents a strong moral and emotional
      grounding. ''We struggled to make ends meet,'' he says, ''but we also had
      a very strong family life.'' He attended Stuyvesant High School, an
      examination school akin to Boston Latin, then Hamilton College, in upstate
      New York, where Moses was one of only three blacks in his class.
      Graduating in 1956, he went to Harvard to do graduate work in philosophy
      (his undergraduate major). Two years later, his mother died and his father
      suffered a breakdown. Moses moved back to New York, supporting himself by
      teaching mathematics at a prep school - and tutoring future Rock and Roll
      Hall of Famer Frankie Lymon.

      A visit to an uncle in Virginia during spring vacation in 1960 fired
      Moses' interest in the civil rights movement. Back in New York, he sought
      out Bayard Rustin, who would mastermind the March on Washington in 1963,
      the rally where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his ''I Have a Dream'' speech.
      Rustin urged him to go to Atlanta for the summer to work at the
      headquarters of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
      To most white Americans, the civil rights movement was a set of
      undifferentiated acronyms: SCLC, CORE, SNCC, NAACP. As those involved
      quickly realized, there were great differences among the groups. The
      NAACP, the oldest and best known, was also the most traditional, with the
      SCLC not far behind. SNCC was the most unorthodox and, not coincidentally,
      also had the youngest membership.

      Moses found himself drawn into SNCC's orbit. The organization sent him on
      a brief trip into Mississippi, making him its first field operative. He
      returned to New York to fulfill his teaching commitment, then went back to
      Mississippi to head SNCC's voting rights project. He would stay there for
      four years, his life in near-constant peril. Moses was beaten, arrested,
      shot at. ''I didn't know enough to be afraid,'' he once said. He just kept
      going, wearing his trademark overalls, urging people on in that quiet
      voice (''Moses could spellbind people by speaking in a whisper,'' Branch
      says).

      In 1964, he helped run Freedom Summer, which brought in hundreds of white
      college students to aid SNCC's efforts in Mississippi, and was the driving
      force behind the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which tried to
      unseat the state's all-white delegation at the Democratic National
      Convention. Local people had taken to referring to him as ''Moses in the
      Bible.'' Now it was New Testament analogies that came to mind. A Freedom
      Summer volunteer wrote, ''He is more or less the Jesus of the whole
      project, not because he asks to be, but because of everyone's reaction to
      him.''

      Moses had always been a man apart in SNCC: older than almost anyone else,
      a Northerner in the South, a contemplative among activists, more mystical
      in orientation than political. These tensions took a toll. He grew
      increasingly estranged from the movement. His marriage ended. He
      gravitated to antiwar work. Despite being 31, he was drafted in 1967. He
      took this to mean the government was targeting him, so he went to Canada.
      Two years later, having remarried, he moved to Tanzania and resumed
      teaching mathematics. ''We were way out in the boondocks,'' Moses recalls.
      His wife, Janet, taught English - she's now a pediatrician with MIT's
      health services - and their four children were born there. (Now grown, all
      are involved in the Algebra Project.)

      Taking advantage of President Carter's draft-evader amnesty, Moses and his
      family moved to Cambridge in 1976 so he could return to the doctoral
      studies in philosophy he'd interrupted almost 20 years before. Then, in
      1982, he received one of the first MacArthur Foundation ''genius'' grants
      just as Maisha Moses asked if she could take algebra. The school didn't
      offer it to eighth graders, but her teacher suggested Moses come into the
      classroom and teach her (as well as the three other interested students).
      The MacArthur grant had freed him financially, so he did. Thus was the
      Algebra Project born.

      ''I think I've got another 10 years of this kind of work,'' Moses says.
      ''I don't have a lot of bad habits,'' he adds, elongating ''lot'' as if to
      suggest he has a few hidden away somewhere. They're hard to find, though.
      He swims 2,000 yards a day. He's a vegetarian. He practices yoga. Just as
      important, he maintains an air of spiritual detachment. It's the
      counterweight to his political commitment and, presumably, is what has
      allowed him to stay dedicated to his ideals for four decades.

      That detachment likely accounts for the fact that during a two-hour
      interview Moses smiles only once. That smile (almost a grin) comes when
      he's asked how it felt to have the state Legislature declare ''Bob Moses
      Day in Mississipp i'' and pass a resolution commending him for his civil
      rights and Algebra Project work. He never really answers the question,
      instead talking about John Hohrn, the state senator whose idea the
      resolution was, and C. C. Bryant, the elderly civil rights veteran whom
      Moses asked to give the address he was supposed to deliver at the State
      House in Jackson. (It's something every successful organizer learns: Keep
      the focus on others, emphasize the group, make sure credit is shared.)
      That's all right, though. The smile is answer enough.