(uplifting music) (upbeat jazz music) - Welcome to Carbondale and our one-on-one conversation, Bob Moses.

- Thank you.

- We are very happy to have you here because you bring with you wherever you go, a history and a connection to great historical figures in this country and a vision of where we need to be going.

So we would like to just converse a little bit about some of what you have seen and some of what you are looking across the promised land to envision for a world that is more just and equitable.

The first question I'd like to ask is when you first heard of the movement, the civil rights movement in the south, not many people were paying attention to that in the north.

How did you first get acquainted with it and what were some of the signs that led you to go into I think it was Atlanta first, wasn't it?

- Right, well what happened, I was teaching school at the Horace Mann School, which is a private school in Riverdale, right outside of Manhattan in New York City.

And I was teaching math and I got there because my family, my mother and father had sort of disintegrated around me.

My mother had passed and my father took ill. And so I left graduate school.

I was at Harvard doing graduate work in philosophy and math and came to teach math at the middle school level at the Horace Mann School.

And so I started there in 1958 and then when 1960, I was still there, I was in my second year there when the sit-ins broke out in February of that year.

And what got my attention was the pictures on the front page of the New York Times.

It was the first time that I'd seen black people really prominently displayed and talked about on the front page of the New York Times.

And as I looked at those pictures, they look like I felt.

The students that were sitting at the lunch counters, demonstrating, the look that they had was a feeling that I had been feeling for quite some time within myself.

And so my uncle, my father's brother, Bill Moses, was teaching at Hampton Institute in Virginia.

And so I went down there on my spring break and stayed with uncle Bill and his family to get a close look at the movement and the students in Hampton were demonstrating Newport News.

And so I walked the picket line, they were sitting in and that night Wyatt Tee Walker came down from Petersburg to do the mass meeting and Wyatt, you know, later became the executive director of King's organization.

So at the meeting, Wyatt said, "Well, we're setting up an office for King in Harlem and we're gonna raise money because King is under the gun in Alabama around some legal issues.

So I went back and went down to the office.

Actually, I went to the organizing meeting for that office because I gotten that from Wyatt and Bayard Rustin headed up that organizing meeting.

And so I volunteered and I started going after school every day to come to the office.

Well, the office was filled on 125th Street with mostly young white leftist kind of liberals, right?

College students.

And I was the only black young student coming in there on a regular basis.

Jack O'Dell was also working out of that office.

And so at the end of the spring, at the end of the semester, I went to Bayard and I said, "Look, I'd like to go down and spend my summer working with SCLC".

And I thought he would send me to Montgomery but he said, "No, there's nothing going on in Montgomery, We'll ask if you can go to Atlanta."

So I did, I went down to Atlanta and I worked in the SCLC office.

And in that office, there were two people.

One person working with SNCC, Jane Stembridge and she was a white southerner who had been in school at Union Theological Seminary and she was sort of their first executive secretary.

She had volunteered.

And the other person was Ella Baker, who at that time was the executive director of SCLC, right?

And so Ella had set up SNCC.

I didn't know anything about SNCC and all the time I was working in the office up there in Harlem, - [Joseph] No one ever mentioned- - No one ever mentioned that there was such a thing.

- And then you finally found out why too!

- So anyway, Ella and Jane hooked up a little project for me.

They said, look, we're trying to hold the first meeting of Southern students from across the south who've been active in the sit-in movement but we don't have any names from Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana.

- [Joseph] So you had to go find them?

- Yes and Ella knew of course all the key leadership in those places, so she gave Jane the names and addresses.

Jane wrote the letters I had.

They put me on a Greyhound bus and off I went.

- And said, good luck (Joseph chuckles).

- Yeah, Talladega, Birmingham.

Shuttlesworth was in Birmingham, Clarksdale.

Aaron Henry was in Clarksdale and then to Cleveland and that's where I met Amzie Moore.

And of course, Amzie laid out the program that we eventually, actually operationalized.

He said, "Look, I think these young people are gonna get this job done but they need to come to Mississippi and when they come, they need to focus on voting, not public accommodations.

They need to get into the issue that black people need to engage the political arena in this broad sense.

And Amzie had all the data, it just blew my mind.

I didn't know that there was this whole congressional district which was by far majority black, that the black people in it couldn't vote because I'd been hearing all through the fifties about the iron curtain, right?

And how these people can't vote and how terrible it is and everything and it just blew my mind that here we were in this country with this congressional district and that black people couldn't vote in it.

So Amzie, you know, the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which set up the Department of Justice civil rights division, right?

And allowed them to begin collecting data.

So he had all of the books that they put out, county by county, the percentage of blacks registered to vote, the percentage eligible and so forth.

So I told 'em I got a year ago on my contract- - Teaching contract, back at Horace Mann?

- Yeah but I'm gonna come back next summer and work on this program.

And Amzie actually went to the conference.

He picked up some students, got in his old Packard, he had one of these big, huge Packards.

He said he wasn't driving around in the Delta in those small cars.

He had a little fortress.

- [Interviewer] Just in case.

- Right, so he was driving around in it.

But he made the trip to Atlanta, went to the conference, laid the program out there.

And of course in Atlanta in that fall, the students were all tied up in direct action and the issue of the beloved community, non-violence, the beloved community, Jim Lawson, the Nashville crowd, you know, Diane Nash, John Lewis, all of the whole circle of people, they were really into direct action.

Something that students could do themselves because voting was different.

It required that you work with organized- - Organized, established community organizations, too.

- Exactly and so the students couldn't vote for the adults, so it wasn't something that they could do, right?

But the organizing work was the point and so that's a different kind of work.

But that wasn't on the main agenda at that conference but there were a group of SNCC people, Chuck McDew, Charles Sherrod, Charles Jones, who were really interested in that issue of getting people full-time into the rural areas of the country in the black belt, around this political issue, organizing around the right to vote.

- I think what you just said about the small group of people that you just named, who were interested in what Mr. Moore had to say reinforces for me why your book, "Radical Equations", that you presented to the public with Charles Cobb is so important because as we have discussed recently, the voices of the movement have not been as prominent as those who have analyzed the movement.

And without the story you have to tell, there are going to be a lot of stereotypical or romanticized notions of the civil rights movement that might wind up having widespread attention and be off the point.

I think it's important already to know that Wyatt Tee Walker, Bayard Rustin and Ella Baker helped to shape you at the very beginning of your work in this area.

And those are three of the most important names in the quote, civil rights movement.

And both Bayard Rustin and Ella Baker's stories have really not been adequately addressed.

And without your voice saying, oh yes but I remember it this way, some of us will never know some of the complexities.

And when you talk, the few moments you just described Amzie Moore, he already had the agenda together, he had already done the research.

He didn't have to go to Cornell or the University of Chicago and do a sociology degree.

He did the work, - Right and Amzie, he had graduated from high school but Amzie had educated himself, both political wise and streetwise, you know?

Because once he made the decision he was gonna stay in the Delta and the decision that his life really would be focused around struggle.

He would have a life, yes but his life would be focused around struggle and his struggle and the struggle of the black people in the Delta took priority in his life, right?

And so when they cut his job, he was working at the post office.

But when I got there, they had cut him down to a few hours on a Saturday.

That was all the hours they would give him.

And he was busy trying to negotiate with people in Washington to get some change and he didn't get his hours changed until after the Voting Rights Act.

That would be when they would change Amzie's hours in the post office.

But he had set up a gas station on Highway 61 and he had gotten some liberal whites and really in this country sort of leftists, the country would think of them as leftist whites, Anne Braden and Jim Dombrowski.

Anne Braden And Jim Dombrowski were part of the Southern Conference Educational Funds.

SCEF is what they called it and Ann was from Alabama, right?

And they and her husband, Carl Braden had been called up before HUAC and all of that.

But they really kept Amzie alive in the Delta.

They scrounged up the money to support his gas station and to send him to New Orleans to get trained how to run a gas station and keep the business.

And so Amzie was still there and functioning.

One of the few that survived the pogrom of the fifties, after you got that a Supreme Court decision and Mississippi led the way with setting up the Sovereignty Commission and spreading it out across the south and really working to eliminate the NACP leadership.

So you had a series of assassinations there in Mississippi of NACP leadership in the late fifties and by the time we got there, you had a handful left.

You had Aaron Henry, Amzie Moore in Cleveland, C.C.

Bryant in McComb, E.W.

Steptoe in Amite.

And then of course, Medgar was right in Jackson as the field secretary.

But they were just a handful of the leadership that was out there.

And of course, what Amzie did was he put me in the loop with that leadership because he was one of that leadership that said, look, the NACP has this strategy but I think this strategy here, this is what we need to do.

- Because he knew where he was.

- That's right.

- And he listened to his environment.

- Absolutely.

- And from reading "Radical Equations", it struck me that that has been one of the touchstones of your organizing tradition, is to first of all, get the same kind of priority.

If you are going to have a life, have a life but commit yourself to this priority of the struggle.

And secondly, stand still.

Who would ever think that we would be quoting Booker T Washington in this context but "Cast down your bucket where you are and bring up the treasures that you find".

- Right, exactly.

- And once you've tasted those, you'll have a good sense of what you must do.

And you have discussed in this book and in a lot of other contexts, the notion of leadership and how one organizes and how the leadership always emerges, depending on what the movement demands.

- Exactly and Ella was the one that really taught us about that and that was her difference, her argument against King and SCLC.

And it was going on as I arrived in 1960, because they were getting ready to replace Ella with Wyatt Tee Walker, and also to ease Bayard out right around this whole issue of sexuality, right?

And so all of those things were going on right there that summer in 1960 and Ella's point was, well, you can have great leaders but you're not sure that the leader won't turn out to have feet of clay.

- Actually, you can be quite sure that the leader will turn out to have feet of clay.

- Well, she wasn't saying that that was going to happen but she was saying that, look, we can't just depend on a single leader.

What we've got to do is look at how leadership emerges from the grassroots, from, you know, movement.

And so what she did, when she set up SNCC, she taught all of us a lesson about organizing, which is that one of the things you do is you set up a structure that you are not intending to be the leader of, right?

And so she did that faithfully.

For all the hours that she sat silently through meetings into the wee hours of the morning.

- [Joseph] She was teaching.

- Yes, exactly.

And even to the very end when we were having days of meetings about how we were gonna do after '64 and 1965 and the organization was crumbling all around, she never said, look, folks, this is what you must do.

Rather than move to try to save what she had helped initiate, she just let it follow its own path.

And that was an enormous lesson for me.

- That was a lesson but it was also a confirmation because you had already seen that style of behavior as a priority.

From high school, you had been studying mystics and philosophers.

And from what you say in your book, your mother had some of that same quality.

If she indeed taught you how to live in the silence quietly, you would have been attracted, I think, to people who were demonstrating how that could be used for social justice and community development.

- Well, that part is true and of course, my mother wasn't political in this broad sense of social justice.

My father was in the sense of thinking of himself as the generic common man.

My father thought he was the man on the street, right?

Who had the point of view of the little man.

And so what does this mean?

Whatever anybody is saying, what does it mean for the little guy?

And so as I tagged along and I loved to tag along with him and he loved to go around and visit people and talk, right?

And so I learned to look at, well, what does this mean for the little guy?

And that of course is what I found in Ella on this large scale and it was one of the fascinating things.

Ella had, in the '30s, she was organizing co-ops in Harlem and as I grew up when we were in first grade and so forth, my mother and myself and my older brother used to run a milk station that was organized by a black Harlem co-op, right?

And every morning we would go out and open up the door in a hallway that was leading down into a basement in the projects.

We grew up in the Harlem River Houses.

And there would be two cases of milk, 20 cartons in each case.

You'd sell them for 19 cents a carton and if you sold the whole case, you were able to get one quarter milk out of the deal.

So that's how we got our milk in the morning.

Well, when I met Ella, she was telling me that she was one of the people who was on the other end of that operation.

- You're almost forced at some point to believe that there is a plan, because the people you keep running into almost in a spiral of history, keep deepening your awareness and your consciousness.

And aren't you really trying to continue that same tradition with the Algebra Project?

The same style, too.

- The same style, right.

What I think the greatest strength of the project has been the growth within the project of what I think of as its products, young people who are emerging in the project who are creating a space and the project is helping them to be able to create a space that belongs to them within which they can organize themselves around a functional concept of themselves as math literacy workers.

So it's so important for the young people to have something that they do, right?

So they're not posturing about who is going to be this or that title but who is gonna learn this or this piece of math well enough so that they can teach it, right?

I mean, we took 13 kids up to the bay area this past weekend on Easter weekend and on Friday morning, they were in the Martin Luther King School in San Francisco.

The school was out, they had 200 students from the school and from a school in Oakland, doing mathematics for three hours in the morning, run by 13 high school students from Jackson, Mississippi.

And at the end of the session, they had the kids up on their feet, yelling and screaming and doing rap songs and everything.

But for three hours, there was just an enormous outpouring of energy, just normal teenage energy, all black students, some few Asians and so forth but around this issue of math, math literacy.

- Accomplishment, the ability to listen and for the children to know that as I said earlier at the beginning of this conversation, that the elders that stretched back far generations are looking at them as the promise.

Someone has to tell them that and then they will discover not only their own talents but the ability to make demands and to be taken seriously in them, which I suppose is about all any of us can do as teachers is to provide that moment for them.

- Absolutely, to provide some space that's a safe space and to help them figure out how to use this, how to grow something that really has a really deep purpose around and this purpose, you know, it's a century old struggle for us.

Four or 500 years, as long as we've been here, the issue of the connection between freedom and literacy.

- Freedom and literacy.

I know, I know.

And in all the texts, even from what they call the slave narratives, as soon as someone learns to read the signs, they discover the strategy for their own liberation.

- Right.

- That's very true.

Very, very true.

The Algebra Project started in your home and it has gone into other homes and no matter what happens to Bob Moses, the Algebra Project is there.

- I think so.

I mean, I think there's certainly been a seed put out here and it's amazing that on Sunday, the same group of kids were in a church, a Church of Scientology in Oakland and the minister, a Reverend Elloise, is 70 years old and she has an amazing ministry and she had come out Saturday to a workshop the kids did for the community in Oakland.

And she was so struck by them that she led them into church on Sunday, at the second service.

She has three services.

At the 10 o'clock service, which was packed an overflow room, people standing on the walls, she led them down the center aisle, these 13 high school students followed her onto the platform and she asked them to do their prime number rap for her congregation.

And they did it and the congregation stood on its feet and just applauded them for a minute.

- I know that took you back to Mississippi When the churches were the nursery for whatever accomplishments the young people brought because the community must confirm and recognize their future standing in front of them and that's how we have always built our own institutions.

And it's nice, it's wonderful to see that that continues, with maybe new costumes and new rhythms behind it but it's the same thing.

- It's the same thing and you know, the first line of the rap says that, "God split the numbers down to prime 'em but he never said that you couldn't rhyme 'em" (Joseph laughs heartily) - The young will always teach us something.

And it is, I think it's truly the greatest challenge we have right now is to have our young people be recognizing themselves.

What you have said to them and what I have tried to say to them, when you discover what your needs are, you will discover the strategies for solving the problems.

If it's gonna rhyme, that's one thing but their great, great grandparents were rhyming songs with information and motor skill development in them after they got through picking cotton and chucking corn.

- Right, I mean, one of the big experiences in my life was on August 31st, 1962, I got on a bus, a school bus in Ruleville in Sunflower County, Mississippi to ride down to Indianola, which was the county seat.

And on that bus, there was this lady who I think she knew every song that had ever been sung in black church.

And she just sang the fear out of everybody - out of everybody.

And you know what?

I wanna thank you because a man who has taught himself to stand there and be unafraid is among us.

Thank you so much for this conversation.

- And that lady was Fannie Lou Hamer.

- I knew that.

All the great names have been spoken.

Thank you, Bob Moses.

- Thanks, Joe.

(upbeat jazz music)