Conference on Lived Theology &
Civil Courage: Speakers
Bob Moses
Robert P. (Bob) Moses resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife, Dr. Janet Moses, pediatrician. They have four children. Mr. Moses was born and raised in Harlem, NY, and received his B.A. from Hamilton College in 1956. In 1957, he received a Masters Degree in Philosophy from Harvard University and he taught middle school mathematics at the Horace Mann School in New York City from 1958-1961.
During his young adult life, Mr. Moses was a pivotal organizer for the civil rights movement as a field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and was director of SNCC's Mississippi Project. He also served as Co-Director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a group that comprised all the major civil rights organizations working in Mississippi at the time. In that capacity, he was recognized as a driving force behind the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964 and in organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which challenged the Mississippi regulars at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, NJ. From 1969-1976, he worked for the Ministry of Education in Tanzania, East Africa, where he was a teacher and chairperson of the math department at the Samé school.
Mr. Moses returned to the USA in 1976 to continue to pursue doctoral studies in Philosophy at Harvard University. A MacArthur Foundation Fellow from 1982 to 1987, Mr. Moses used his fellowship to work full-time teaching algebra to seventh and eighth graders as a school volunteer in the Open Program of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Elementary School in Cambridge, MA. During that period, Mr. Moses developed the concept for the Algebra Project and began to carry it out together with concerned parents, teachers, educators and activists. Bob Moses is the author of the Algebra Project-Transition Curriculum, which uses experiential learning drawn from the work of Dewey, Lewin, Piaget, Quine, and Kolb-and a five-step curricular process Moses innovated-to help middle school students make the conceptual shift from arithmetic to algebra and be prepared fkr algebra in the eighth grade, and thus a collece preparatory math sequence in high school. These materials formed the backbone of Algebra Project teacher and trainer training, and implementation throughout the USA, with a particular focus on the South. Mr. Moses is founder and president of the Algebra Project Inc., and also serves as director of the project's curriculum development program, while teaching algebra and geometry full-time at Lanier High School in Jackson, Mississippi.
The Algebra Project's work has been supported by numerous generous grants from organizations such as the National Science Foundation, the Open Society Institute, The John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the Walton Family Foundation, the Annenberg Rural Challenge, the Barr Foundation, the Arthur M. Blank Foundation, the Poss-Kapor Foundation, as well as through direct service contracts with school districts and individual donations.
Mr. Moses has received several college and university honorary degrees and honors, including the Heinz Award for the Human Condition (2000), the Nation/Puffin Prize for Creative Citizenship (2001), the Mary Chase Smith Award for American Democracy from the National Association of Secretaries of State (2002), and will receive the James Conant Bryant Award from the Education Commission of the States in July, 2002. Mr. Moses' life is chronicled in several historical accounts of the Civil Rights Movement-in print, radio and film. Mr. Moses, with Charles E. Cobb, Jr., authored Radical Equations-Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project (Beacon Press, 2001), which is currently in its fourth printing, and has sold over 12,000 copies since February 2001, and also has won several awards.
"The most important product of the Algebra Project … continues to be the young students whom it serves. I think of the Project as working the demand side of the education conundrum that America faces. In the 60s, we were young and organizing an older generation to make appropriate demands on the country. In the year 2000 plus, we are older and organizing a younger generation to do the same. In those times, we organized Mississippi Sharecroppers around the right to vote and political access. In my mind, young black students in Mississippi and in most of the country who make demands to be educated follow in this organizing tradition. In these times, we organize Mathematics Literacy Workers around education and economic access."