Robert P. Moses: Civil Rights Activist & Founder of The Algebra Project
Posted on 18. Nov, 2009 by Leshell Hatley in Places of Scholarly Work, Scholarly Celebrations
Robert P. Moses was a Freedom Rider in the 1960s and is founder of The Algebra Project, an innovative program that teaches mathematics literacy to children to prepare them for higher education and success in life.
Educator & Civil Rights Activist
Educated at Hamilton College and Harvard University, Moses taught mathematics at the Horace Mann School in New York from 1958 to 1961 before leaving to work full time in the civil rights movement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was the main organizer of Freedom Summer, in 1964 (a voter registration drive). He endured numerous beatings and incarcerations in the course of his work for civil rights.
When I first came to Mississippi, most Black people were living in the rich cotton-growing land of the Delta, where they were a majority of the population, were living in serfdom on plantations. They had no control over their lives — their political lives, their economic lives, their educational lives. Within industrialized U.S. society, a microcosm of serfdom had been allowed to grow. The civil rights movement used the vote and political access to try to break that up.
We are growing similar serf-like communities within our cities today…What is central now is the need for economic access; the political process has been opened — there are no formal barriers to voting, for example — but economic access, taking advantage of new technologies and economic opportunity, demands as much effort as political struggle required in the 1960s.
Sixty percent of new jobs will require skills possessed by only 22 percent of the young people entering the job market now. These jobs require use of a computer and pay about 15 percent more than jobs that do not. And those jobs are not dwindling. Right now, the Department of Labor says, 70 percent of all jobs require technology literacy; by the year 2010 all jobs will require significant technical skills.
Education, Awards, & Books
Dr. Moses earned his doctorate in philosophy from Harvard, was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1982, and founded The Algebra Project later in that decade. Robert Moses is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Heinz Award for the Human Condition, which seeks to honor those individuals who have created programs that protect and empower disadvantaged individuals. MY HERO celebrates Robert Moses, teacher and math literacy crusader, for his dedication to giving disadvantaged youth the opportunity to experience their economic potential in an increasingly technological society. Moses teaches math at Lanier School in Jackson, Miss., and lives in Cambridge, Mass. He is also the author of two books.
Freedom Summer
Radical Equations - Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project
The Algebra Project
The Algebra Project, Inc. is a 501 (c) (3) national, nonprofit organization that uses mathematics as an organizing tool to ensure quality public school education for every child in America. We believe that every child has a right to a quality education to succeed in this technology-based society and to exercise full citizenship. We achieve this by using best educational research and practices, and building coalitions to create systemic changes.
Why focus, as we do, on algebra, of all things?
The computer, of course, is the symbol of the great technological shift that has occurred since World War II. Everybody knows that there’s something going on with computers out there…Everybody is willing to accept that what is powering these now-indispensable computers is a mathematical, symbolic languages. So, while the visible manifestation of the technological shift is the computer, that hidden culture of computers is math.
That sets the stage; you have something in there that you can organize around if you’re concerned about math literacy.
Algebra was assigned a certain role, a certain place in the education system. Students learned how to manipulate abstract symbolic representations for underlying mathematical concepts. Now here comes history, which brings in technology that places abstract symbolic representations front and center. These representations are the tools that control the technology, and in order to use this technology to organize work you have to understand these symbolic representations and the place that society has assigned for young people to learn this symbolism — this is algebra. So, now algebra becomes an enormous barrier.
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