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Robert Parris Moses

Robert Parris Moses '56

Jan. 23, 1935-Jul. 25, 2021

A summary of his accomplishments on the Hill published in the 1956 Hamiltonian began as follows: “Here is an unmitigated idealist.” Following his death on July 25, 2021, in Hollywood, Fla., he was eulogized by noted historian and biographer of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Taylor Branch, as “the thoughtful, self-effacing loner… the father of grass-roots organizing … listening to people, letting them lead.”

Robert “Bob” Parris Moses ’56 led an extraordinary life, repeatedly validating the Hamiltonian’s characterization. His experiences on the Hill were foundational to his later accomplishments. Born in Harlem, N.Y., the son of a janitor and a homemaker who lived in the Harlem River Housing Project, Bob gained entrance to Stuyvesant High School, New York City’s premier public secondary school for study of the sciences and mathematics and known as having the most rigorous entrance requirements of all of the city’s nine public magnet schools. He came to Hamilton in 1952.

By any measure, Bob excelled at Hamilton. He was a member of the Emerson Literary Society and, as a sophomore, Doers & Thinkers honor society. He played both basketball and baseball for three years, served as captain of the baseball team his senior year, and sang in the College Choir throughout his Hamilton career. He was a member of the French Club beginning in his sophomore year and joined the Philosophy Club a year later, becoming its president as a senior. His service to the College included two years on the Honor Court and three actively promoting the Campus Fund. He was vice president of the Class of 1956 and drew the attention of Who’s Who in American Colleges

He majored in philosophy and was strongly influenced by the writings of Albert Camus on ideas of rationality and moral purity. His interactions with Professor Channing Richardson and his wife, Comfort, both leading members of the local Quaker community, led to his undertaking a trip to France sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee. His experiences during that trip were formative as he contemplated the forces required to bring about social justice, concluding that social change could only really come from the bottom up. The balance of his life’s work would be testimony to that belief.

But his achievements on the Hill came at a price: having to endure racism on campus. In the face of untoward remarks and other microaggressions, Bob learned, as he told Professor Maurice Isserman in a 2002 Hamilton Alumni Review article, “to keep a blank face” and hide his true feelings about such behavior. One instance occurred when a friend was compelled by his parents to withdraw an invitation to spend Thanksgiving with his family once his parents found out that Bob was Black. As he also recalled to Isserman, “Hamilton was part of the country … [a]nd the country was living under Jim Crow. … There wasn’t any way for Hamilton not to be part of that.” 

After Hamilton, Bob moved on to earn a master’s degree in philosophy from Harvard and then accepted a position in the mathematics department at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx. He did not stay for long. By 1960, many were staging sit-ins and otherwise demonstrating for their civil rights in the Jim Crow South, and Moses relocated to Mississippi to help organize the struggle to secure voting rights.

During this period, he drew the attention of two important figures in the civil rights movement: Bayard Rustin and Ella Baker, whose mentorship proved invaluable and profoundly influential. Both advocated for empowering individuals to press for civil rights in a nonviolent manner. Moses worked for five years in southwestern Mississippi, teaching local residents how to register to vote and how to pass the stringent (and often arbitrarily designed) literacy tests.

His efforts and those of one or two other organizers, all affiliated with the newly organized Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), were not welcomed and were viewed with suspicion by both sides of the community. Things came to a head in August 1961, when in Liberty, Miss., he was assaulted by a white man using the handle of a knife as he stood in front of the county courthouse. Bleeding from a head wound that would require eight stitches, he nonetheless proceeded into the building. Bob pressed charges, but his assailant claimed self-defense, and an all-white jury acquitted him. Whether the fact that the aggressor was a cousin of the county sheriff had anything to do with that verdict is unknown. 

Bob confronted more resistance — he was jailed several times; his office was burned; and on one occasion near Greenwood, Miss., a group of white men in a passing car shot at him. He persevered.

In 1964, he helped to organize the Freedom Summer that brought many white student volunteers to Mississippi to register African Americans to vote. The larger purpose of that initiative was to bring national publicity to the effort and to pressure Congress to enforce Black voting rights. That same year, Bob played a major role in the efforts of the racially mixed Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to unseat the all-white delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J., an effort that ultimately failed, leaving him deeply disappointed and ready to turn his attention to other matters.

By 1965, he was immersed in resistance to the Vietnam War. At the first anti-war protest he attended in April of that year, he asserted, “the prosecutors of the war are the same people who refused to protect civil rights in the South.” Shortly thereafter, even though he was by then 30 years old, well beyond the age of those subject to the military draft, he received his induction orders. He suspected it was payback for his outspokenness. Rather than be drafted, he moved to Canada and later to Tanzania where he taught school and worked for the Tanzanian Ministry of Education for 10 years during which he was active in the development of secondary schools. There his wife, Janet, gave birth to three of their four children.  

After President Jimmy Carter granted amnesty in 1977 to those who had evaded the draft during Vietnam, Bob and his family returned to Cambridge, Mass., so he could continue work on his doctoral studies in the philosophy of mathematics at Harvard. In 1982, concerned about the limitations of the math curriculum available to his daughter Maisha (then in eighth grade; pictured above with Bob after he spoke to a class in Christian Johnson at Hamilton College in 2019), he began the third and, in some respects, most momentous period of his life. Maisha’s school did not offer algebra. He requested that she be allowed to sit apart from the other students and study the subject on her own. The teacher had another idea. Bob was invited to teach algebra to Maisha and several other gifted students.

Bob had recently been awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship (known as a “Genius Grant”)* in honor of his work in the area of education and philosophy. As the foundation put it, “In his teaching and writing, Moses has remained committed to the promotion and understanding of philosophical ideals and their integration with the processes of social change.”

Bob had come to believe that mastery of algebra in particular and mathematics more generally were essential for young members of marginalized groups to succeed. “Math literacy is a civil right,” he would argue. “Just as Black people in Mississippi saw the vote as a tool to elevate them into the first class politically, math is the tool to elevate the young into the first class economically.” This principle and the opportunity to work with his daughter and her classmates represented the beginning of what would come to be known as The Algebra Project, to which Bob would devote the rest of his life.

The design of this new math curriculum closely paralleled the strategies he had employed during his voting-rights work in Mississippi. There he worked to empower citizens to fight for their right to vote. Now he sought to empower students to take charge of their own education, rather than being taught by “a sage on the stage.”  

There were five steps to this collaborative study process. Students began by observing their neighborhoods, noting what had the potential to be expressed mathematically (“personal experience”). Next, they drew pictures of what they saw. Step three was to discuss these images and their mathematical implications with their peers in their own words (“people talk”). After that, they worked to explain their observations within the formal language of mathematics (“feature talk”), and finally they translated that information into an equation or other symbolic representation.  

In this approach, mathematics is closely linked to lived experience. It is not an abstract language, a quality it often assumes in conventional pedagogies. It would be impossible for a student enrolled in The Algebra Project to say to herself, if not to others, “What’s the point? I will never use any of this stuff in my life.” Bob taught his students mathematics arises from “life.”

The efficacy of his approach was amply demonstrated by the achievement of students enrolled in his classes and those of his disciples. In Cambridge, 92 percent of those completing this curriculum were enrolled in upper-level math courses in the ninth grade, twice the rate of peers who had not been part of The Algebra Project. At a middle school in San Francisco, 56 percent of Black graduates of the program were taking college-preparatory classes in the ninth grade, compared with just 24 percent of those who had completed conventional math classes. In Mississippi, eighth graders in a middle school that used the program scored above the mean on standardized tests taken by all students enrolled in eighth through 12th grade. 

Bob kept his hand in The Algebra Project throughout the rest of his life, teaching in Jackson, Miss., and continuing to develop curricular models to advance students’ active, collaborative engagement with his subject. In the words of mathematician and President of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Edward A. Hrabowski III, the results have been “an excellent way of connecting mathematics to life itself” by “helping young people and adults understand that math is throughout life.” 

Bob was honored by the College in 1991 with the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters. He was similarly honored by Swarthmore College in 2007. He received the Heinz Award in the Human Condition for his development of The Algebra Project in 2000 and the James Bryant Conant Award in 2002, among numerous other honors. Looking back on his life, one can see how the “unmitigated idealist” from the Class of 1956 would bring about positive change in many people’s lives as a “thoughtful, self-effacing loner” who listened to others and enabled them to lead.

Robert P. Moses is survived by his wife of 53 years, four children, and seven grandchildren. The College has established the Robert Moses Scholarship Fund in his honor. Gifts can be made at www.hamilton.edu/give.

*The MacArthur Fellowship is awarded to those who (1) exhibit exceptional creativity;(2) show promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments; (3) exhibit potential for the Fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work. It is fair to say that in Robert Moses and The Algebra Project the MacArthur Foundation got its money’s worth and then some.

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