Community Mourns the Death of Former HM Faculty Member and Civil Rights Leader Dr. Robert Moses
The Horace Mann School community was deeply saddened by the death of civil rights leader Dr. Robert Parris (Bob) Moses, on July 25, 2021. A former HM math teacher, Dr. Moses continued to inspire students and faculty through his lifelong social activism.
"The loss of Dr. Bob Moses is a great loss to this country," said Head of School Dr. Tom Kelly. "His passing is also a profound loss to the Horace Mann School community. Bob Moses inspired our students as a teacher over 50 years ago, and returned to HM in recent years to inspire our entire community. We share our deepest condolences with his beloved family, and with the generations whose lives he sought to improve."
Born in 1935 in New York City, Dr. Moses attended Stuyvesant High School and then majored in philosophy and French at Hamilton College. He earned a Masters' degree in philosophy from Harvard University in 1957 and taught math to Horace Mann School's middle school students from 1959 to 1961. Involved in NYC's local civil rights movement at the time, the growing violence toward civil rights activists compelled Dr. Moses to leave teaching and move to Mississippi to devote himself to this cause. There he joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, traveled with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and became the architect of the 1964 voter registration campaign and the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. Despite his many arrests and time spent in jail, Dr. Moses was known for his calm in the face of violence, and for training a generation of civil rights activists.
Dr. Moses eschewed the celebrity he gained through his work in the movement, and in late 1964 and early 1965 he resigned from his leadership positions. However, he continued his activism, and also became an early critic of the Vietnam War, speaking at his first antiwar protest in Washington, DC, in 1965. Not long after he and his wife Dr. Janet Jemmott moved to Tanzania, where they lived in the 1970's, becoming parents of three of their four children. After eight years of teaching in Africa, Dr. Moses returned with his family to the U.S., where he completed a Ph.D. in the philosophy of mathematics at Harvard.
Awarded a MacArthur Fellowship or "genius grant" in 1982, Dr. Moses founded The Algebra Project that same year. This national initiative uses mathematics literacy as an organizing tool to guarantee quality public school education for all children in the U.S. The program has fostered advanced learning for students in urban and rural communities throughout the country. In his 2001 book Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project, Dr. Moses described his work in this area as an extension of his civil rights efforts.
Dr. Moses returned to HM in 2001 and 2017 to speak with students about his social justice activism. In 2015, the Horace Mann School Class of 1964 helped HM establish the Robert Moses Prize. Given annually since 2016, the prize "provides a graduating Horace Mann School student with a passion for social justice with funds to pursue a social justice cause." As Dr. Kelly wrote in a letter to members of the Class of 1964, the goals of the award are "to focus the entire student body on Bob's story, and the tremendous impact a passion for social justice can have, and the meaning it can give one's life."
Pictures of the 2017 visit by Dr. Moses to HM can be found here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/141038450@N03/albums/72157678727776510
Return to The Lion's Pride - Summer 2021