"A MAN NAMED MOSES"

 “A MAN NAMED MOSES”

Amzie Moore was an African-American WWII veteran, living in Cleveland, Mississippi, in the late 1950’s.  After fighting for democracy in Europe, when he returned to his native Mississippi, he owned a gas station, but he was determined to work for democracy in his home state.  He began to work on getting African-Americans to vote, and it was a heavy slog.  He asked his friend, Ella Baker, part of SNCC, to find someone to send to him to help him work for voting rights in Mississippi.

In August, 1960, Ella Baker’s emissary knocked on Amzie Moore’s door.  Moore was astonished at the physical presence of the emissary, a young man named Bob Moses.  Moore later recalled that Moses was frail, wore glasses, and was soft-spoken.  Is this the man that Ella Baker sent?  How could he stand against the Pharoahs of Mississippi, with their armies of sheriffs and police and state patrols and white mobs?  Moore was not the first, nor the last, to be surprised by Bob Moses.  He and Moses would work together with others to change Mississippi and national history.

Bob Moses died last month at age 86, and though he had never sought it, he had reached legendary status as a civil rights organizer and later as the founder of the Algebra Project, which was designed to ensure that “minority” kids received the math skills and thinking that they needed.  He was born in Harlem in 1935, whose parents were a janitor and a domestic worker.  He was a brilliant student and got a scholarship in 1952 to almost-all-white Hamilton College.  There he was attracted to philosophy, math, and the Quaker philosophy of non-violence.  He later stated that he was convicted and inspired by the Black student sit-ins in 1960.  He was inspired that they were no longer being passive in an oppressive and racist system.  He decided to go into the belly of the beast to help secure human rights and voting rights.  And, as Nina Simone once sang, “Everybody knows bout Mississippi.”

He arrived there and began to organize people to seek to throw off the idea of the internalized oppression from the system of race, an oppression that told them that they were inferior and deserved inferior status.  He began organizing in McComb and was beaten up and shot at, because of these efforts.  He was also attracted to Sunflower County, where the poverty and fear were so great.  He organized there, and he ended up taking eighteen people to register to vote in the county seat of Ruleville.  One of those eighteen people was Fannie Lou Hamer.  They were not successful, but the fires were being lit.

After months of frustrating and dangerous activity, Moses made a fundamental decision, which would change the course of history and eventually end neo-slavery in the South.  Black friends had been beaten up and even killed for their efforts, with very little coverage from the media and no support from the federal government.  Moses decided to organize Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964, with the express purpose of getting “white” young adults to come and work for justice.  He made the calculated decision that if white people (especially from the North) were beaten up in Mississippi, there would be a lot more coverage and attention paid to the Mississippi movement.  

In 1964, hundreds of white and Black volunteers streamed into Mississippi. And, tragically but not surprisingly, some were killed.  Two whites, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and one Black man, James Chaney were killed together in Neshoba County.  During the search for the bodies of these three men, many other Black bodies were discovered.  Moses’ non-violent, costly strategy had worked.  One year later, the Voting Rights Act would be enacted into law – it would end neo-slavery in the South.

Moses was also a fierce opponent of the Vietnam War.  He applied for conscientious objector status.  One of the most non-violent men of all, his application was denied – I still can’t believe that I was granted a CO, but he was not.  He moved to Canada and later to Africa, returning to the USA after President Jimmy Carter granted amnesty  in 1977 to those who had left the country in opposition to the war.  

Then, he began his next monumental work:  the Algebra Project, designed to make certain that poor kids, especially poor kids of color, would get the math skills and critical thinking that they needed.  He began the project in 1982 with a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, and it is still going today.  Moses was a giant in so many ways, a non-violent but definitely not passive genius and organizer.  There is so much more to his life and witness, so if you don’t know his story, please look him up.  Like the Moses of the Hebrew Scriptures, he has shown us paths in the wilderness to find our home.