Bob Moses

Robert Parris Moses was the principal SNCC organizer of voter registration in Mississippi from 1961 onward and the architect of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer. Working at enormous personal risk, he and the local Black Mississippians who worked with him built the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and its challenge to the regular all-white state delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. He was arrested and beaten repeatedly across the early 1960s, including jailings in Liberty, McComb, and Greenwood; in 1961 he was charged in McComb after being beaten unconscious by a white assailant whom the local sheriff refused to prosecute. He later founded the Algebra Project to extend mathematical literacy as a civil rights tool.