American civil rights activist Robert Moses dies at the age of 86

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Robert Parris Moses, an American civil rights activist, endured beatings and imprisonment while leading a black voter registration campaign in the southern United States In the 1960s He later helped improve mathematics education for ethnic minorities. He has died at the age of 86.

During the Civil Rights Movement, as the Mississippi Field Director of the Student Nonviolence Coordination Committee, Moses was committed to eliminating apartheid and was The “Summer of Freedom” in 1964 Hundreds of them went to the south to register voters.

Moses founded the Algebra Project in 1982 and began his “Chapter Two of Civil Rights Work”, which included courses developed by Moses to help poor students succeed in mathematics.

Ben Moynihan, the director of operations for the Algebra Project, said he had spoken with Moses’ wife Janet Moses, who said that her husband died in Hollywood, Florida on Sunday morning. No information was provided about the cause of death.

Moses was born in Harlem, New York on January 23, 1935. Two months ago, a race riot killed 3 people and injured 60 people in the nearby area. His grandfather, William Henry Moses, was a famous Southern Baptist missionary and a supporter of Marcus Garvey, the leader of black nationalism at the turn of the century.

But like many black families, the Moses family moved from south to north during the Great Migration. Based on “Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots” by Laura Visser-Maessen (Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots) It is said that once in Harlem, his family sold milk from a black-owned cooperative to help supplement family income.

While attending Clinton Hamilton College in New York, he became a Rhodes scholar and was deeply influenced by the writings of French philosopher Albert Camus and his thoughts on the rationality and moral purity of social change.

Subsequently, Moses participated in a Quaker-sponsored European tour and consolidated his belief that before obtaining a master’s degree in philosophy from Harvard University, change was bottom-up.

It wasn’t until 1960 that Moses took part in a recruiting trip and “saw the movement with his own eyes” that he stayed in the Shennan region for a long time. He found Pastor Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, but found that there was little activity in the office, and soon turned his attention to SNCC.

“I was taught to take away voting rights behind the Iron Curtain in Europe,” Moses said later. “I never knew that the right to vote behind the scenes of cotton here in the United States was taken away.”

The young civil rights advocate tried to register black people to vote in rural Amite County, Mississippi, where he was beaten and arrested. When he tried to charge a white assailant, an all-white jury acquitted the man, and a judge provided protection for Moses so that he could leave.

He later helped organize the Mississippi Liberal Democratic Party, which tried to challenge the all-white Democratic delegation from Mississippi.

But President Lyndon Johnson prevented the rebellious Democrats from voting in the convention, and instead allowed Jim Crown Southerners to stay and attract national attention.

Disappointed by the reaction of the white liberals to the civil rights movement, Moses soon began to participate in demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and then severed all ties with the whites, even former SNCC members.

Moses worked as a teacher in Tanzania, Africa, returned to Harvard to obtain a Ph.D., and taught high school mathematics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In later life, the shy Moses founded the algebra project.

The historian Taylor Branch won the Pulitzer Prize for his “Watershed”, and he said that Moses’ leadership embodies a paradox.

“In addition to attracting the adoration of young people among young people like Martin Luther King Jr did in adults,” Blanche said, “Moses represents an independent concept of leadership.” People” and inherited by “ordinary people”.



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