Robert Parris Moses

February 22, 2016
Robert Parris Moses, a legendary figure in the civil rights movement and founder of the Algebra Project, an educational foundation for disadvantaged children, has led many lives, merged into a single life of service. Visser-Maessen, a Dutch historian specializing in the civil rights movement, eschews the trappings of conventional biography and focuses on Moses’s activities (the best-known of which are the Mississippi-centered voter registration drives, the Freedom Summer Project, and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party) and philosophical influences (chiefly Albert Camus and Quaker pacifism). Given Moses’s commitment to grassroots-based activism, Visser-Maessen pays close attention to his daily activities as a self-effacing organizer. Sometimes the detail overwhelms, but it allows the author to delineate the roles of significant activists less known to the general public, such as Ella Baker and Amzie Moore. It also conveys the pervasive racial terror in Mississippi in the mid-20th century. While focusing on Moses’s civil rights work, Visser-Maessen conveys that his subsequent work in education was not a departure, but a meaningful step forward. Of special value is the final section, a comprehensive critique of Moses’s treatment in civil rights historiography. 10 illus.

March 15, 2016

In this debut work, Visser-Maessen (American studies, Utrecht Univ., Netherlands) brings together an intriguing character study of one of the most profoundly impactful local organizers of the civil rights era. Through the author's new scholarship, we see Robert Parris Moses (b. 1935) develop as an activist and become a necessary bridge among grassroots organizations and disenfranchised Southern blacks experiencing hardship from Jim Crow laws designed to prevent all but the most affluent and educated from voting. Moses held a unique stature as an organizer, if not always outright leadership roles in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). After discovering his calling in local campaigns in Mississippi, Moses was influential in encouraging deprived Southern residents to register to vote. While such an effort had also been advanced by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), it was Moses who was able to seek regional collaborators and advance community voices in his pursuit of voting rights. VERDICT This compelling biography will be sought after by scholars of civil rights history and local organizing.--Jim Hahn, Univ. Lib., Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

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