Sad news that Bob Moses, a leader of the civil rights movement, died on July 25, 2021. We commemorate his work with a replay of his appearance on Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay, first released on June 20, 2014. Mr. Moses traces the events that led him to take up a leading role in Freedom Summer.
STORY TRANSCRIPT
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to The Real News Network. Iâm Paul Jay in Baltimore, and this is Reality Asserts Itself.
Weâre continuing our series of interviews with Bob Moses, who was one of the most influential leaders of the civil rights movement. Heâs the founder of the Algebra Project. He was also one of the leaders of the Mississippi Summer project. And Bob joins us again in the studio. Thanks for joining us.
BOB MOSES, EDUCATOR AND CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST: Yeah.
JAY: So, one more time, Bob is an educator, a civil rights activist. During the â60s he was a field secretary for SNCC. He also was an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. And heâs the founder of the Algebra Project, as I mentioned. Heâs also the author of Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project, and coeditor of Quality Education as a Constitutional Right: Creating a Grassroots Movement to Transform Public Schools.
Thanks for joining us.
MOSES: Yeah.
JAY: So weâre going to pick up where we were. I asked you at the end of the last segment what you learned from the sit-ins, and what effect that had on you.
MOSES: I knew that something big was going on, right, âcause I knew about my uncle, I knew about, you know, the lynchings and stuff like that. So I went down to visit Uncle Bill on my spring break. And so at this point in my life Iâve been at Harvard, Iâve gotten an MA. So I graduate from Hamilton in â56. I spent a year at Harvard, I pick up my MA. Iâm back there trying to get a doctorate when my mother passes, right? Sheâs really still young. Sheâs in her early 40s. My father just goesâhe deteriorates, right, and he ends up in the hospital. So I leave, go back to New York, and get a job, eventually, teaching at Horace Mann School teaching math. And Iâm there when the sit-ins break out. And so I go down on my spring break to see my uncle Bill.
JAY: Go down where?
MOSES: To Hampton, Virginia. Right?
So the students at Hampton are marching, demonstrating in Newport News, right? So I march with them over and walk the picket line while they sit in. And Wyatt Tee Walker comes down to do the mass meeting. Now, Wyatt eventually becomes the head of Kingâs organization, right, but right then heâs a minister in Petersburg. He announces that theyâre going to set up an office in Harlem to raise money for King. So I get all the information and go back and go to the organizing meeting. Bayard Rustin is running that organizing meeting and ran the office, right? And so I go down every afternoon after school and volunteer at the office, right? I meet Jack OâDell, who later becomes Kingâsâover his citizenship program, helping to run the program that Septima Clark developed in South Carolina. So they actuallyâHarry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier headlined the fund-raising event. They do it at the armory where my fatherâs working, right, the 369th Armory, right? And after the event, I asked Bayard if I can go down and work with King. Iâm thinking heâs still in Alabama. So he tells me, well, Iâll send you to Ella Baker in Atlanta. Right? So Ella was actually at that time Kingâs executive director, right, of SCLC.
And so I get down that summer to Atlanta. And there in the office, Ella has a little room in the office. King uses his fatherâs office at the church. Dora is his secretary. And Jane, Jane Stembridge, is a young, white volunteer who had been at the Union Theological Seminary and came down to the meeting that Ella called that formed SNCC, and volunteered to be the first executive secretary for SNCC. So sheâs in the office there. We hit it off âcause philosophy and theology. Right? Weâre talking all the time. And so that is where I learned about SNCC, and thatâs where I begin the journey that eventually takes me to Mississippi.
JAY: So what year are we in?
MOSES: So this is 1960. The sit-ins hit in February 1, 1960. Ella had organized, on Easter weekend in 1960, the conference to bring the sit-in leaders together. And she did that âcause Ella had been working across the South throughout the â30s, â40s, â50s, so she knew everybody who had actually worked in the South against this racial apartheid, right? So she, through her contacts, got the sit-in leaders to come to her university as she graduated, Shaw in North Carolina. Right? So at that meeting she actually did something that impacted later all the work that I did, which was she created a space that protected the organizers, the leaders of the sit-in, from the older civil rights organizations that wanted them as a youth wing of their operation. So she kind of insisted and created a space so that they could come together and form their own organization. And thatâs how SNCC came into being. And that happened on that Easter weekend.
JAY: And somewhere here you decide, or it kind of happens, that this becomes your life.
MOSES: Well, what happens is what they do at theâthey set up a coordinating committee. Marion Barry is the first chairperson. And while Iâm working, Iâm doing this volunteer work, Iâm staying at the YMCA in Atlanta. The coordinating committee comes and has its first meeting that summer in Atlanta, and they decide that theyâre going to have a conference in the fall for sit-in leaders from across the South. And Jane has to be the organizer for the conference, right? Sheâs their secretary. And she comes to me and says, âI have problem: I donât have any names from Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana of any people who sat in or any kind of sit-in activity in those states,â and asks me if I will go scout, right? So I agree. She and Ella get together, and Ella knows all of the really NACP or SCLC leadership in those states, gives the contact information to Jane; Jane writes letters to them saying that SNCC is sending its field representative, right, to come. And so I take off. They put me on a Greyhound bus. I take off. Talladega, Birmingham, Clarksdale, Cleveland, Jackson, Shreveport, New Orleans, and Biloxi, Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile, back to Atlanta.
JAY: And, now, youâd been in New York. Clearly there was a black world and a white world. But youâd been in this, you know, elite education. But is this your first real drenching in the deep South?
MOSES: Yeah, this was the first time. I mean, our family onceâI know at least once, maybe twice, our whole family when we were young went down to visit Uncle Bill. Right?
JAY: So how did that feel? What was the impression?
MOSES: Well, I was young, right [crosstalk]
JAY: No, I mean this trip now.
MOSES: This trip now? Yeah, so Iâm a scout, right? Iâm also somehow representing this very militant sit-in organization. Thereâs an expectation. So at the bus stop in Atlanta, theyâre watching to see where I sit when I get on, right? So I sit up front until we get to the Georgia line and I go back. So when the bus hit Anniston, which is where later the Freedom Rider bus was bombed, the Highway Patrol guy comes on, but Iâm in the back. He canât tell me from anybody else, right? When I go to Clarksdale, right, Aaron Henry sees me off, and theyâre watching where I sit. I sit up front, but nobody else is on the bus then.
But when I get to Cleveland, Amzie, heâs working at the post office. Theyâve actually cut his hours down so he only works Saturdays, right? But heâs not home. I go over to the post office. But he tells me the rumor is that the Freedom Riders, that these sit-in riders have come to town, right?
But really Iâm really working as a scout undercover, so to speak. Iâm trying to be as inconspicuous as I can.
JAY: But your now direct experience with the apartheid, I mean, itâs not that it doesnât exist in New York, but it doesnât exist to the extent it did in the South. Does anyâdid that impress you in a specific way? Or is it kind of just what you expected?
MOSES: So, well, what Iâm being exposed to is, and really throughâAmzie was the first one who really begins to take me in. I spend several days there, and Amzie is the one who tells us what we should do, right? I mean, he really is the one that saysâ. Heâs sitting onâheâs compiling the information about voter registration in the Delta. And it blows my mind, because Iâve been to all the schools, and weâre talking about, you know, the Iron Curtain; people are giving lectures at Horace Mann, and everybody oh, these people have to vote over there in Eastern Europe and everything, and no one, nobody ever said anything about this congressional district in Mississippi which is 80 percent black in terms of eligible voters that has never sent a black person to Congress, right? So it just blows my mind. And Amzie is plotting how heâsâhow weâre going toâ. And he sees the sit-in movement and the youth energy. Heâs the only one on that whole trip who really sees that the energy is there now to take on Mississippi, right, in the Deep South.
JAY: And this becomes an issue of voter registration. Thereâs many more potential black voters, but theyâre not being allowed to vote, essentially.
MOSES: Right. Yes. So itâs not sit-ins, right? So thereâs no need to have direct action for (you know, sit-in activity here) what we really need. And Amzie hasâhe has a mind that has grown up and actually penetrated the mind of the white Southern male, men, right? So he has a real sense of what it needs and what it takes, how to turn the key thatâs going to unlock this thing, exceptâ.
JAY: And what was it?
MOSES: Well, itâsâwhat it turned out to beâand this piece of it Amzie didnât haveâit turned out to be the national Democratic Party structure.
JAY: Well, we going to pick up this whole issue of voter registration and the Democratic Party and the fight within the Democratic Party as we continue Reality Asserts Itself with Bob Moses. Please join us for the next segment on The Real News Network.
