Liberation Equations - Bob Moses, civil rights activist

Progressive, The, August, 2001 by Andrea Lewis

I wondered whether I should have my hearing checked when I first heard that Bob Moses, the famed civil rights activist, was comparing the fight for voting rights in the 1960s to his current campaign to teach math to minority students. But give him a few minutes, and he'll convince you that he's not crazy.

"In the '60s, we were organizing around the right to vote for political access, and we were successful to a large extent in getting that," Moses told me in a phone interview earlier this year. "[Now] what we're using is algebra as an organizing tool for educational and economic access."

For the past twenty years, Moses has poured his energy into the Algebra Project. He defines it as "a national mathematics literacy effort aimed at helping low income students and students of color--particularly African American students--successfully achieve mathematical skills that are a prerequisite for full citizenship in the Information Age."

This spring, Moses came to Oakland for an Algebra Project workshop. "The sharecroppers that we worked with in the '60s, those who couldn't read and write, were the designated serfs of the Industrial Age," he told the multigenerational, largely African American crowd gathered at the West Oakland Senior Center. "They were designated to do a certain kind of work and have a certain kind of schooling--sharecropper schooling--that was appropriate to that work. What we are growing now in our cities are the designated serfs of the Information Technology Age. The jobs which are dead-end jobs are like the sharecropping jobs--chopping cotton and picking cotton--only you're chopping and picking in an urban area where you have a job which cannot lead anywhere and which cannot support a family."

Thirty-seven years ago, Moses was field secretary for SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), and the soft-spoken, visionary force inside both the Freedom Summer Project and the formation of the maverick Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The Harlem native had attended a high school for gifted children, later studied the philosophy of mathematics at Harvard, and eventually went on to work for the ministry of education in Tanzania.

It was while he was caring for his father and working as a math teacher in New York that he was first struck by the events of the civil rights movement.

"The sit-ins woke me up," he says in the first sentence of Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights, co-written with civil rights veteran Charles E. Cobb, Jr. "Until then, my black life was conflicted. The sit-ins hit me powerfully, in the soul as well as the brain."

In those volatile days in Mississippi, one of Moses's most powerful allies was Dave Dennis, who was then the Mississippi director for CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality). Like me, Dennis had profound skepticism when he heard about Bob Moses's latest organizing efforts. "Poor Bob, I thought," writes Dave Dennis in the foreword for Radical Equations. "He's lost his mind, `flipped out.' He's out here comparing math to the civil rights movement." But soon Dennis realized that his old colleague was on to something. "With so much history connecting us, I couldn't just shrug off Bob's new effort to organize around math literacy," Dennis writes. "Although I still had not come to any clear conclusions about the project in my own mind, I was beginning to sense its importance."

Dennis is now director of the Algebra Project's Southern Initiative, which is based in the same Mississippi Delta region where the two first met.

Dealing with resistance is nothing new to Bob Moses. "There's a big psychological gap to overcome," he told a television reporter back in 1964, referring to the obstacles activists faced during the voting rights movement. "There's what a lot of people call the psychology of fear on the part of most of the Negroes. They've been brainwashed. They think that somehow all of this is the business of the white man and that this is not something they're supposed to be doing."

The same is true for many people--not just African Americans--who don't understand why they need to study algebra.

I always hated math. I trace my revulsion back to a memorable day in the mid-1960s when our grade school homeroom teachers announced that our arithmetic books were being replaced with a new text: Sets and Numbers. Just when I was getting a handle on what fractions and percentages were all about, arithmetic was out and "new math" was in.

What I remember most about that time was a sense of confusion about how this thing called mathematics connected to my life. A trip to the corner store made me understand why I needed to learn to add, subtract, and multiply, but what the heck did I need integers and equations for?

Bob Moses explains why. "We need a discussion about education as our primary opportunity structure for everybody," he told the Oakland audience. "How are we going to put a floor under all of our children so that when they graduate from high school they have an option to go to college and they have the skills they need so they have access to a job that can support a family?"