Robert P. Moses '56, author, mathematician and civil rights activist, gave the keynote address at the "Making Change - Working for Social Justice Conference" organized by the Kirkland Project on October 5. His talk was on "The Presumption of Innocence, Sharecropper Education and America's Ideals."
Moses founded the Algebra Project, a national program that teaches math literacy to rural and inner-city students. The Algebra Project, based in Cambridge, Mass., assists some 10,000 students each year. Moses developed the Project in 1982 out of a belief that math literacy is the key to economic access.
His message for the Hamilton audience was that, just as spreading reading literacy was a crucial component of the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South in the early 1960s, so today is spreading math literacy critical to achieving equal economic opportunity for all of America's young people.
In his keynote address Moses interwove the sharply contrasting stories of sharecropper "Ruby Daniels" with the activities of the elite colleges and universities. (Ruby Daniels' story is told at length in Nicholas Lemann's "The Promised Land.")
In the early- to mid-1900s, sharecroppers received only a basic education because it was thought that was all they needed. In the 1940s, more than 5 million workers were displaced and moved north to cities like Detroit and Chicago when machines took over labor in agricultural and particularly cotton picking. Moses said, "What traveled with this curse was sharecropper education."
Marching along in time as the sharecroppers headed for the northern urban slums were the changes happening at universities like Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Moses said the question facing them was, "How should America select its elite to run the country and manage its affairs?" He described the evolution of achievement tests to determine which public high school students might succeed in college.
Although he downplayed his own role in the Civil Rights movement, Moses said, "Was it fair to deny a whole generation access to education because of politics? Was it fair to deny access to politics because of literacy?"
"We should put a floor under all of our students. We need other policies designed to fix our schools ... not just provide a bail out for some of our students," said Moses. He explained that existing strategies for improving inner city education, including vouchers, magnet and charter schools and busing, are at best partial and inadequate, because they concentrate on saving a few lucky students from the "sharecropper education" which was destined to be the fate of most of the students -- an education for serfdom, rather than for taking advantage of the opportunities available in a knowledge-based post-industrial society.
Moses, in his talk, drew on material from the following: Nicholas Lemann, "The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America" (1991), and The Big Test: The Secret History of The American Meritocracy " (1999), and John M. Barry, "Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America" (1997).
Earlier, the students taking College 130, "Coming of Age in America: Narratives of Difference" had the opportunity to meet with Moses, who gave a special presentation followed by informal discussion in the Kirner-Johnson auditorium.
