Moses cradled the bleeding driver and managed to bring the careening car to a stop.Īrrested and jailed many times, Mr. Moses was a passenger as it drove through Greenwood, Miss., Mr. Moses later wrote, so he had to be driven to another town, where nine stitches were sewn into his head.Īnother time, three Klansmen shot at a car in which Mr. There was no Black doctor in the county, Mr. Bleeding, he kept going, staggering up the steps of a courthouse to register a couple of Black farmers. At one point during a voter-registration drive, a sheriff’s cousin bashed Mr. White segregationists, including local law enforcement officials, responded to his efforts with violence. Over the next five years, he helped to register thousands of voters and trained a generation of organizers in makeshift freedom schools.

In 1960 he left his job as a high school teacher in New York City for Mississippi, where he organized poor, illiterate and rural Black residents, and quickly became a legend among civil rights organizers in a state known for enforcing segregation with cross burnings and lynchings. “If you look at his work, he was always pushing local leadership first.” “He exemplified putting community interests above ego and personal interest,” Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., said in a phone interview. He said he drew inspiration from an older generation of civil rights organizers, like Ella Baker, a leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and her “quiet work in out-of-the-way places and the commitment of organizers digging into local communities.”

Typically dressed in denim bib overalls and seemingly more comfortable around sharecroppers than senators, he insisted that he was an organizer, not a leader. Moses cut a decidedly different image from other prominent Black figures in the 1960s, especially those who sought change by working with the country’s white political establishment. His daughter Maisha Moses confirmed his death. Bob Moses, a soft-spoken pioneer of the civil rights movement who faced relentless intimidation and brutal violence to register Black voters in Mississippi in the 1960s, and who later started a national organization devoted to teaching math as a means to a more equal society, died on Sunday at his home in Hollywood, Fla.

Radical Equations by Robert P. Moses