RADICAL EQUATIONS: Math, Literacy, and Civil Rights.

• Author: Garrow, David J.
• Position: Review

RADICAL EQUATIONS: Math, Literacy, and Civil Rights by Bob Moses and Charles E. Cobb, Jr. Beacon Press, $21.00

BOB MOSES IS ONE OF THE most famous veterans of the Southern black freedom struggle. A legendary organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Moses headed up SNCC's work in Mississippi and was the guiding force behind the 1964 "Freedom Summer" project that culminated in the unsuccessful effort to seat an integrated Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Soon after that defeat, Moses left SNCC and moved, first to Canada, and then to Tanzania, remaining away from the United States until 1977.

Both in the years before he joined the Southern struggle and during his years in Tanzania, Bob Moses worked as a math teacher. Once he returned to the states, Moses re-entered the Harvard Ph.D. program he had dropped out of 20 years earlier. When he expressed disappointment with the insufficiently challenging level of mathematics instruction his eldest daughter was receiving in the eighth grade of a Cambridge public school in 1982, her teacher responded by inviting Moses to become a volunteer algebra instructor in her classroom.

Thanks in part to an unsolicited five-year grant from the MacArthur Foundation, Moses used his voluntary teaching as a springboard toward building what by the mid-1980s was officially christened "The Algebra Project": a program designed to allow all high school students access to college-prep level mathematics by introducing them to the principles of algebra during the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades.

Radical Equations is the story of how the Algebra Project has developed and expanded over the past 15 years. Written primarily by Moses's one-time SNCC colleague Charles E. Cobb, Jr., the book details why Moses assigns such importance to middle-school algebra instruction and explains the powerful linkage Moses sees between a present-day mathematics curriculum that challenges students to devote themselves to academic schoolwork and the political-organizing legacy of the Mississippi voting-rights movement.

The first part of Moses' case is straightforward: "Economic access and full citizenship depend crucially on math and science literacy," yet in much of America, "illiteracy in math is acceptable the way that illiteracy in reading and writing is unacceptable." Moses's goal of making college-level mathematics accessible to all high school students is, however, only an...