By Kalhan Rosenblatt - NBC News
Robert Parris Moses, a civil rights activist who was beaten and jailed while leading campaigns to register black voters in the 1960s, who also fought to improve minority math education, has died at 86. .
Ben Moynihan, director of operations for the
Algebra Project
organization
, confirmed the news after speaking with Moses' wife, who told him that he had passed away Sunday morning in Hollywood, Florida.
Although he
did not provide information on the cause of death
.
The reactions of fans, educators and activists to the death did not wait on social networks.
[Biden and Harris ask to protect the right to vote in honor of the legacy of Congressman John Lewis]
The Martin Luther King Jr. Center called Moses a brilliant leader, among other accolades.
"#BobMoses is dead. What a brilliant, conscientious and actively compassionate human being. Educator. Organizer. Leader. Rest in peace sir," the center tweeted.
José Vilson, an activist, educator and writer, tweeted that he was grateful for Moses' contributions and shared a photo of the two of them together.
"I was lucky enough to give Robert 'Bob' Moses flowers while I could still smell them. When I read 'Radical Equations', I felt a path opening up in my math pedagogy that I hadn't seen before. Thankful for the work this giant put into Earth. RIP, ”he wrote.
Cornel West, the progressive scholar and activist,
said "words fall short" to describe Moses
.
"My dear brother Bob Moses, spiritual genius, intellectual giant and moral titan, has left us! Words fall short! He was larger than life and one of the great examples of our humanity! Let us never forget him ! "
tweeted.
Biden escalates battle over Republican voting-limiting laws
July 13, 202101: 52
Moses worked to end racial segregation
when he was the Mississippi field director of the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) during the civil rights movement and was instrumental in the 'Summer of Freedom' in 1964, in which hundreds of students traveled south to register black voters.
His 'second chapter in civil rights work' began in 1982, when he founded the
Algebra Project
through a MacArthur grant.
It included a curriculum that Moses developed to
help poor students succeed in math
.
[Obama dismisses Congressman John Lewis with an emotional tribute, in which he asked to act to guarantee the minority vote]
Moses was born in Harlem, New York, on January 23, 1935, two months after three people died and 60 others were injured in a racial riot in the neighborhood.
His grandfather William Henry Moses had been a prominent Southern Baptist preacher and supporter of Marcus Garvey, a leading black nationalist at the turn of the century.
Moses hadn't spent much time in the Deep South until he went on a recruiting trip in 1960 to "see the movement for myself."
He approached the Martin Luther King Jr. Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, but found little activity in the office and soon turned his attention to the SNCC.
"I was taught about the denial of the right to vote behind the 'Iron Curtain' in Europe," Moses later reflected, referring to the socialist countries in the orbit of the Soviet Union after World War II.
"I never knew that the right to vote was denied behind a 'Cotton Curtain' here in the United States," he
added.
Moses tried to register blacks to vote in rural Mississippi's Amite County, where he was beaten and arrested.
When he tried to press charges against a white assailant, an all-white jury acquitted the defendant and a judge had to protect Moses so he could safely leave the county.
["We Lost a Giant": Reactions to the Passing of Congressman and Civil Rights Activist John Lewis]
Disillusioned with the reaction of white liberals to the civil rights movement, Moses soon
began participating in demonstrations against the Vietnam War and later severed all his relationships with whites
, including his former SNCC colleagues.
Moses worked as a teacher in Tanzania, then returned to Harvard, where he had already earned a master's degree in philosophy, to obtain a doctorate in philosophy, and taught high school mathematics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Historian Taylor Branch, author of the Pulitzer -
winning book "Parting the Waters' award (
Parting the Waters)
, said that
the leadership of Moses embodies a paradox
:
"In addition to having elicited the same kind of admiration among the youth of the movement that Martin Luther King caused among adults, Moses represented a different conception of leadership," which had emerged and was being practiced by "the common people," Branch wrote. .
With information from The Associated Press.
