Changing the formula 

By TIM SIMMONS, Staff Writer 

It has been 40 years since Bob Moses persuaded sharecroppers to vote during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Now much older but no less committed to those same ideals, Moses is enlisting a new generation in a fight to improve their lives. On Monday morning, he and three dozen students from Jackson, Miss., were prodding students in the tiny school district of Weldon to see the power of math literacy. 

"Everyone said sharecroppers didn't want to vote," said Moses, considered an icon of the civil rights movement. "It wasn't until they began lining up at the polls that we got people's attention. Now it is time for the students to demand what everyone says they don't want. They must be literate in math to be a part of the future." 

Just east of Interstate 95 about 90 minutes northeast of the Triangle, Weldon was one of the worst school districts in the state only five years ago. 

When the state's top educators were pushing for more school accountability, they used the scores at Weldon to make their case. After a year of instruction at the seventh-grade level, students' math skills had regressed. Only four of 10 students in the district could do grade-level math work. 

Today almost 75 percent of the students in Weldon score above grade level on the state's mandated exams. Superintendent Jerry Congleton gives much of the credit to a program developed by Moses called the Algebra Project. 

"It is more than just math scores that have improved here during the past five years," Congleton said. "In the spirit of the program, we have pulled our entire community into the effort. The academic performance of our schools was pretty atrocious back then. We had to do something." 

Congleton was determined to overcome generations of failure. But the idea that teaching algebra could somehow be an extension of the civil rights movement baffled even many of Moses' long-time friends. 

"Poor Bob, I thought, disheartened. He's lost his mind," civil rights organizer David Dennis wrote in the foreword to a recent book on the program, "Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights." Today Dennis is an integral part of the program, which is used by almost 10,000 students in 28 cities throughout the country. 

Throughout the book, Moses and author Charles Cobb explain how the principles of community organizing used in Mississippi can also be used to encourage students to demand the academic skills they must have to succeed in life. 

A math teacher before he became a civil rights icon, Moses sees algebra as a minimal skill. It is through algebra that students learn to use and apply numbers in a way that has become critical, given the role of technology in the workplace. 

"But the demand must come from the bottom up," Moses said. "We can show them why it is important, but they must be the ones who demand it." 

While it is tempting to limit the comparison of his work today to the civil rights strategies of the 1960s, Moses believes that doing so misses a more important point of understanding how so many black children have arrived at this point in history. 

To help illustrate his answer, he points to a single event in 1944 that attracted several thousand people to a plantation just outside of Clarksdale, Miss. As the crowd watched, eight bright red machines picked one full field of cotton with amazing speed. It wasn't long before thousands of uneducated black workers were no longer needed in the South. 

Just one year before -- in 1943 -- the U.S. Army ushered in the computer era with something called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. It would be years before the importance of that machine was understood. And by that time, millions of black workers had migrated North to the industrial centers of the United States. Literacy was not required. 

"What they brought with them was their sharecropper education," Moses said, "the same kind blacks continued to receive in the South." 

Moses could see the divide growing when he taught his eighth-grade daughter, Maisha, in 1982. Having just received a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, Moses had the financial freedom to take a job at Maisha's school in Cambridge, Mass., teaching algebra to his daughter and several of her classmates. From those classes the Algebra Project was born. 

Weldon is the only school district in North Carolina that uses the Algebra Project, partly because of its cost, partly because it is not a perfect match with the state-sanctioned curriculum and partly because it requires community effort. 

And as Monday's visit to Weldon High School soon revealed, training students to demand more of their schools can also be a messy business. 

To promote the program, Moses travels once a year with current and former students whom he teaches back in Mississippi. At each stop, the students from Mississippi are joined by local students involved in the Algebra Project. Together, they run math-demonstration projects designed to help their classmates understand basic concepts of algebra. Moses simply steps aside to watch. "This is about student leadership," he said amid the din that quickly filled the room. 

Both the students and student-mentors struggled with the relationship at times. Trying to teach the rules of an algebra game to a table of seven boys, Bertha Holden of Mississippi finally blurted out in frustration: "Do you even know what prime numbers are?" 

After initially fighting requests to cooperate, several of the boys began working with Holden. Within 30 minutes, Jacob Jackson decided to show her what he knew.  When the first group of students was replaced by a second for another round of demonstrations, Holden asked Jackson to stay and lead the instruction himself. 

Some of Jackson's classmates listened as he explained the game. Others ignored him. Throughout the cafeteria, the scene repeated itself at table after table. By the end of the second hour, many students were scribbling equations onto small red cards and rushing to a "judge's table," where their answers would be graded. 

Sometime today the students from Mississippi are to arrive in Charleston, S.C. They'll run their demonstrations again. Again, it's quite likely to be messy and loud. The single day of work won't raise anyone's algebra grade, but those who have been with the program for several years hope it might plant a seed. 

"This is about more than just algebra," said Marquita Banks, a senior at Weldon High School who has worked with the program since 1996. "It's about understanding the power of working together. It makes me feel like I'm a part of history here -- the new generation in a movement." 

Staff writer Tim Simmons can be reached at 829-4535 or tsimmons@nando.com