Culture

Bob Moses’s Pioneering Fight for Voting and Education Rights


The moniker “civil-rights leader,” which appeared in some of the headlines noting the passing of Bob Moses on Sunday, at the age of eighty-six, is literally accurate: he was one of the most important figures in the civil-rights movement during its peak period, in the middle years of the nineteen-sixties. But one should not get the impression that Moses was a stentorian, march-leading type. He had a kind of reverse charisma. He came across as not just quiet but almost painfully shy. He had studied both the Quaker and Buddhist traditions, and he’d sometimes take the podium in front of a room full of people and say nothing, for an uncomfortably long time, as a way of showing that he was there to listen, not just to be heard. It’s impossible to imagine him running for office, as so many of his peers in the movement did. He was closer to being a sacred mystic than he was a politician.

Bob Moses was an organizer and a champion of an idea he called “constitutional citizenship.”Photographs by Eli Reed / Magnum

It’s worth recalling how deep a taboo surrounded the cause that brought Moses to prominence—voter registration in Mississippi—when he took it on. There is a brief but memorable scene in “Birth of a Nation” introduced by a title card that reads “The next election.” A band of Ku Klux Klansmen in white robes, mounted on horses, stand guard at a polling place, turning back Black would-be voters. The Klan, and the many similarly purposed but differently named white terrorist organizations that sprang up across the South during Reconstruction, are misremembered as having been less explicitly political than they actually were. Their aim was voter suppression locally and de facto nullification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution regionally—a cause celebrated by whites, in self-consciously religious language, as the “redemption” of the South. They won. It wasn’t just that Black voting was made difficult; it was existentially risky, because everybody remembered that it had been violence, not conventional politics, that ushered in the Jim Crow era. And it wasn’t just would-be voters who were intimidated; politicians, even liberal Northern politicians up to and including Franklin Roosevelt, were unwilling to take on the cause of reëstablishing Black voting rights. This was what Moses, who never chose to play as “courageous,” was willing to take on.

Moses wanted to establish a new constitutional amendment guaranteeing a high-quality education for every American.

Moses’s first major project began when he left his job as a high-school teacher in New York to go South; his second began when he founded the Algebra Project, which aimed to improve math education for poor Black youth, in the early nineteen-eighties. The two may not seem obviously connected, but they both had the goal of enabling ordinary people to exercise more power, over their own lives and in society more broadly. Moses was an organizer, and he was concerned, as great organizers often are, with the daily lives and needs of individuals, and with the not always visible social systems that define people’s possibilities and limits. Voting and education, to his mind, were the primary mechanisms that people could use to make things better for themselves. During Reconstruction, when Black people in the South had a measure of political power, they used it to build schools; after Reconstruction, the loss of the right to vote meant the loss of political power, which meant the loss of the right to a good education, which meant lives of severely restricted prospects.

In his last years, Moses promoted an idea he called “constitutional citizenship”—a key aspect of which would be a new constitutional amendment establishing a federal guarantee of a high-quality education. This would run counter to the deeply embedded American tradition of decentralized public education, which falls under the control of more than thirteen thousand local districts. He was well aware that when it came to voting, which is similarly under local control, it took the direct involvement of the federal government to engender a better deal for Black people, and the withdrawal of the federal government to make things worse. It was typical of Moses that he liked to be artfully unspecific about how his idea of a guaranteed education would function in practice. He wanted to frame a discussion that would then take its own course, while insuring that the debate would take into account how unacceptable it is that the norm is for American children to have highly unequal access to educational resources. Bob Moses’s legion of admirers should now take pains to carry on that part of his work.


New Yorker Favorites



READ NEWS SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.