Liberation Equations.

• Author: Lewis, Andrea
• Position: Bob Moses, civil rights activist

I wondered whether I should have my hearing checked when I first heard that Bob Moses, the famed civil rights activist, was comparing the fight for voting rights in the 1960s to his current campaign to teach math to minority students. But give him a few minutes, and he'll convince you that he's not crazy.

"In the '60s, we were organizing around the right to vote for political access, and we were successful to a large extent in getting that," Moses told me in a phone interview earlier this year. "[Now] what we're using is algebra as an organizing tool for educational and economic access."

For the past twenty years, Moses has poured his energy into the Algebra Project. He defines it as "a national mathematics literacy effort aimed at helping low income students and students of color--particularly African American students--successfully achieve mathematical skills that are a prerequisite for full citizenship in the Information Age."

This spring, Moses came to Oakland for an Algebra Project workshop. "The sharecroppers that we worked with in the '60s, those who couldn't read and write, were the designated serfs of the Industrial Age," he told the multigenerational, largely African American crowd gathered at the West Oakland Senior Center. "They were designated to do a certain kind of work and have a certain kind of schooling--sharecropper schooling--that was appropriate to that work. What we are growing now in our cities are the designated serfs of the Information Technology Age. The jobs which are dead-end jobs are like the sharecropping jobs--chopping cotton and picking cotton--only you're chopping and picking in an urban area where you have a job which cannot lead anywhere and which cannot support a family."

Thirty-seven years ago, Moses was field secretary for SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), and the soft-spoken, visionary force inside both the Freedom Summer Project and the formation of the maverick Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The Harlem native had attended a high school for gifted children, later studied the philosophy of mathematics at Harvard, and eventually went on to work for the ministry of education in Tanzania.

It was while he was caring for his father and working as a math teacher in New York that he was first struck by the events of the civil rights movement.

"The sit-ins woke me up," he says in the first sentence of Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights, co-written with civil rights...