Biography
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.
The contemporary newsletter individually names him among the SNCC workers arrested in Lexington on May 8 after Hartman Turnbow’s home was attacked. It reports their release on May 13 after the arson charges were dropped. This separately documented episode supplies no first physical admission time or completed actual duration; none is reconstructed from the dates. The newsletter says an interfering-with-an-investigation charge against Moses continued.
Payne individually names Moses in the March 1963 Greenwood protest-arrest group and describes the workers’ continued actual jail experience. The printed headcount says eight while listing nine names. An agreement to release the group is not a verified physical discharge date. The precise physical admission, discharge and actual duration of this separate event remain unknown.
Source: Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (2007 edition), original PDF page 124; Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom (2007 edition), original PDF page 126.
