February 25, 2025 • 18 mins
In this episode of Math! Science! History! we explore the life and legacy of Bob Moses, a pioneering activist and math educator. Discover how Moses used mathematics as a tool for social justice, empowering underserved communities with the freedom to learn and create change. We will delve into his work with the algebra project, his impact on civil rights, and how his unique approach to teaching math has influenced generations. Tune in for a deeper look at the role of education in shaping history.
If you are interested in reading more about Bob Moses, as well as the history of math and science, please visit me on my blog at www.MathScienceHistory.com !
Links and resources:
The Algebra Project
Bob Moses Biography
To buy my book Hypatia: The Sum of Her Life on Amazon, visit https://a.co/d/g3OuP9h
Thank you for listening! Until next week, carpe diem!
Gabrielle
MUSIC:
Gift of the Stars is by Lloyd Rodgers and is public domain. www.LloydRodgers.com
Delta and Mississippi Tyranny is by Gabrielle Birchak. Vocals by Anthony Williams. Music is copyrighted (2025) and not for public use.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) It's Black History Month, and we are still
celebrating black excellence.
This week, I am talking about one of
my favorite activists and mathematicians, Bob Moses.
His life and legacy made an indelible mark
on America's civil rights movement and math education.
Hi, I'm Gabrielle Burchak, and I have a
background in math, science, and journalism.
By the time you're done listening to this,
(00:21):
you will know a lot more about an
incredible individual who changed many lives.
In the year 415, the infamous philosopher and
mathematician, Hypatia of Alexandria, Egypt, was savagely murdered
by church monks.
(00:43):
This murder shocked the Roman community and its
government leaders.
Hypatia was known far and wide as a
respected philosopher, mathematician, government advisor, and a professor.
Hypatia, the sum of her life, is a
book that I wrote that looks not just
at the circumstances surrounding her death, but also
(01:03):
at the sum of her entire life.
I weave in the details of her education,
disciples, Neoplatonic philosophies, female contemporaries, and the many
mathematics that she wrote and taught about.
There is truly more to Hypatia's life than
her death.
Hypatia, the sum of her life, written by
me, Gabrielle Verchak, is now on sale on
(01:26):
Amazon.
Buy your copy today.
Today's podcast is about a person I've wanted
to talk about for a long time.
Robert Moses, also known as Bob Moses, realized
that math literacy is an extension of the
civil rights movement.
(01:46):
Math is more than about understanding numbers, science,
and data.
It is a tool for helping kids learn
a skill that empowers them in school, college,
and life.
I've always been inspired by Moses's story.
And before I start, I want to give
some context to this podcast.
I grew up in Denver, Colorado, where I
attended South High School.
(02:08):
Yay!
I was lucky to go there because it
was out of my district.
And what made the experience memorable was attending
a school with great diversity.
Our principal was Mr. Harold Scott, South's first
black high school principal.
He often held school assemblies that taught us
so much about black America's rich history, including
(02:30):
information about the civil rights movements in the
1960s.
And I really consider myself truly fortunate that
I received this education.
So after our assemblies, I would go to
the library and find a couple of books
that taught me more about the civil rights
movement.
So I was 15 years old when I
learned about Freedom Summer.
It was also known as Mississippi Freedom Summer
(02:53):
or the Freedom Summer Project.
It was organized and launched by the Council
of Federated Organizations, also known as the CFO,
which was an alliance of four primary civil
rights organizations.
These organizations included the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
also known as the SNCC, the Congress of
(03:13):
Racial Equality, also known as CORE, the National
Association for the Advancement of Color People, also
known as the NAACP, and the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, the SCLC.
Bob Moses was the field secretary of the
SNCC and the co-director of the CFO
and directed the Freedom Summer Project.
(03:34):
And I will go more into this later,
but for context, this is how I learned
so much about Bob Moses.
And I've been following his career ever since
I was in high school in the eighties.
I have always been inspired by his story,
his tenacity, and his ability to organize and
mobilize.
Bob Moses was born on January 23rd, 1935
(03:54):
in Harlem, New York.
His father, Gregory H.
Moses, was a janitor and his mom, Louise
Paris Moses, stayed home to raise the kids
in the Harlem River Houses, which was a
public housing complex.
In the projects, they had a small one
-room library that would open once a week
where his mom would go and gather a
couple of books for him.
(04:16):
So he was raised in a family that
loved him and encouraged education.
He grew up in a world where racial
segregation and inequality were deeply embedded in American
society.
However, unlike many civil rights leaders of his
time, Moses did not come from the South.
Instead, he was shaped by the urban struggle
(04:36):
of Black communities in New York.
He attended Stuyvesant High School, one of the
most prestigious public schools in the city.
From there, he went to Hamilton College, where
he studied philosophy and French.
In 1957, he earned a master's degree in
philosophy from Harvard University.
He had started his work on his PhD,
(04:57):
but his mother had passed away and his
father had to be hospitalized.
So in 1958, he returned to New York
to help his parents.
While in New York, he taught math at
Horace Mann School in the Bronx and tutored
math to private students.
Moses's journey could have easily led him to
a quiet life as an academic, but history
had other plans.
(05:17):
Inspired by the student sit-ins in the
South, Moses decided to join the growing civil
rights movement.
In 1960, Bob Moses became involved with the
SNCC, an organization led by young activists committed
to direct action against segregation.
Unlike some of the more prominent leaders of
the movement, Moses was known for his quiet,
(05:37):
strategic approach.
In 1961, he went to Mississippi, one of
the most dangerous places in the South for
a Black activist.
The state was notorious for its violent suppression
of Black voting rights.
Moses helped launch the Mississippi Voter Registration Project,
which worked to empower African Americans to exercise
their right to vote.
(05:58):
His work was about registering voters and shifting
the power dynamic.
He saw voting as the key to breaking
the cycle of oppression that kept Black communities
in poverty and political invisibility.
As I noted earlier, various organizations and civil
rights groups led the Mississippi Voter Registration Project.
It was created to empower Black citizens as
(06:19):
they were kept from voting.
At the time, the state governments would require
Black and African Americans to take literacy tests,
tax them at the polls, intimidate them, and
worse yet, beat them.
Mississippi was one of the most dangerous places
for civil rights activism.
White supremacist groups, local law enforcement, and state
(06:40):
officials used threats, arrests, and violence to prevent
Black voter registration.
In the 1960s, Mississippi was one of the
most dangerous places for civil rights activists.
And it still is.
In 2023, Mississippi presented a bill in the
Senate introducing restrictions on protests around the state
(07:01):
-owned buildings.
Even though it's been 60 years since the
civil rights movement, numerous states across the country
have governments that implement a range of discriminatory
practices and strive to disenfranchise Black voters and
other marginalized communities.
Some measures currently being implemented include strict voter
(07:21):
I.D. laws, reduction of early voting periods,
limitations on mail-in voting, and the purging
of voter rolls.
So, back to 1961.
When Moses went to Mississippi, he faced beatings,
arrests, and constant threats to his life.
His resilience and fortitude are extraordinary.
(07:42):
While he was in Mississippi, white segregationists, including
the police, were horribly violent towards the entire
organization, including Moses.
Once, when he was riding through Greenwood, Mississippi,
Klansmen shot at the car.
The driver was hit, but miraculously survived.
Nevertheless, Moses brought the car to a stop
(08:04):
and held the bleeding driver.
Another time, when he was assisting two Black
farmers during a voter registration drive and walking
them up the steps of a courthouse, Moses
was bashed in the head with a knife
handle by the cousin of the sheriff.
He was bleeding extensively but kept going up
the steps.
Only after he helped them register did he
(08:26):
reach out for medical help.
There wasn't a Black doctor in this specific
county, so he had to be driven to
another town where he received nine stitches in
his head.
I know this is a podcast about math
and science, but still, this story is important
because equality for marginalized communities is essential.
Moses worked so hard in these areas to
(08:48):
make sure that Black and African Americans received
their right to vote.
Sadly, one of the most tragic moments of
this period was the murder of three civil
rights workers that included James Chaney, Andrew Goodman,
and Michael Schwerner.
The Ku Klux Klan brutally killed them.
This act of terror only reinforced Moses' belief
(09:09):
that the fight for equality needed to be
waged on multiple fronts.
By the mid-1960s, his work contributed to
the eventual passage of the Voting Rights Act
of 1965, which outlawed discriminatory practices like literacy
tests and poll taxes.
But after years of activism, Moses withdrew from
(09:30):
public life.
He recognized that others who followed his example
were getting killed, and this weighed heavily on
him.
So, he sought refuge from the trauma and
intensity of the movement.
In 1966, Moses received a draft notification.
He was 31 years old.
The cutoff age for being drafted was 26,
(09:53):
which meant he was six years older than
the required age.
He was suspicious of this draft notice and
believed that it was the action of government
agents.
As a result, he moved to Canada, where
he stayed for a while.
Then, he moved to Tanzania, Africa, with his
wife, where he worked as a math teacher
for the Ministry of Education.
(10:14):
He remained in Tanzania until 1976, and then
returned to the U.S., eventually landing in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In the 1980s, while helping his daughter with
her math homework, he realized she was struggling
with the topic.
That's when he had an epiphany.
Math literacy was just as crucial as voting
(10:34):
rights had been in the 1960s.
In an interview with NPR, he is quoted
as saying, education is still basically Jim Crow
as far as the kids who are in
the bottom economic strata of the country.
He went on, explaining that no one knows
about them, no one cares about them.
And unfortunately, he is correct.
(10:55):
And this was made evident, especially during COVID,
when a lot of students who were in
the bottom economic strata of the country didn't
even attend classes.
In 1982, Moses received a fellowship with the
MacArthur Foundation.
This fellowship spurred him to start the Algebra
Project, a groundbreaking initiative to make math accessible
to students in underserved communities.
(11:17):
The project aimed to provide quality education as
a constitutional right for all students.
He saw math education as a new civil
rights issue, which was if black and low
income students were not given the tools to
succeed in math, they would be locked out
of future economic opportunities, particularly in STEM fields.
(11:39):
In 2002, the project received financial support from
the National Science Foundation.
Upon receiving this support, the project created a
benchmark for students who were in the bottom
quartile.
This benchmark was that they graduated high school
on time and were prepared to do the
college math required to graduate.
This approach is unique.
(12:00):
In a 1996 article in Smithsonian Magazine, the
author, Bruce Watson, writes, quote, the program begins
with gumdrops and toothpicks used to make geometric
constructs.
It moves on into subway trips with the
stops becoming positive and negative numbers, then into
narratives of the same trips and identification of
(12:22):
various points of interest.
These then are assigned symbols.
Students get involved, dealing with both abstractions and
practical logic.
At first, learning ratios by mixing lemonade, one
part sugar, three parts lemon juice, it sounds
simple minded, but it works.
In schools that use the Algebra Project, a
far higher number of students go on to
(12:43):
high school algebra than they ever did before,
and they do well, unquote.
Moses developed a unique approach to teaching algebra,
using real world experience to help students grasp
mathematical concepts.
He was able to turn math into action
and make it engaging and approachable, which in
turn made it accessible to a multitude of
(13:05):
students who benefit from it.
The Algebra Project is still in operation today,
and it continues to have such an incredible
influence.
The Algebra Project is based on three principles
that include, one, site development.
That's the work that the Algebra Project does
with the schools.
Two, research.
That's the research they conduct to implement math
(13:28):
literacy.
And three, professional development.
And that's the training they provide to teachers
to help make math approachable.
The Algebra Project isn't only about math, it's
about empowerment.
Moses believed that just as literacy had been
necessary for full citizenship in the 20th century,
math literacy was essential in the 21st century.
(13:50):
Without it, entire communities would be shut out
of economic and technological advancements.
The project now includes schools across the country,
reaching thousands of students.
It also inspires initiatives like the Young People's
Project, where high school students and college students
become math tutors and mentors for younger students.
(14:11):
To learn more about the Algebra Project, please
visit them at algebra.org.
Moses' vision went beyond traditional education reform.
He argued that the problem wasn't with the
students, it was with the system that failed
to equip them with the skills that they
needed to succeed.
His work challenged schools to rethink how they
(14:33):
taught math, making it more relevant and engaging
for students from all backgrounds.
Bob Moses continued his work with the Algebra
Project well into the 2000s, advocating for educational
reform and equity in math education.
Even as he aged, he remained deeply engaged
in the fight for justice.
He recognized that literacy, specifically in math, would
(14:56):
not be given.
Instead, proper education would be a challenge for
the Black communities to obtain, much like it
was a challenge to obtain voting rights during
the Civil Rights Movement.
On July 25, 2021, Robert Paris Moses passed
away at the age of 86.
His death was a significant loss, but his
(15:18):
legacy lives on in the thousands of students,
educators, and activists he inspired.
And oh, how he inspired.
Robert Paris Moses was a man of quiet
determination.
He was a strategist who believed in grassroots
empowerment.
Whether fighting for voting rights in Mississippi or
(15:39):
math literacy in classrooms, he never sought the
spotlight.
Instead, he simply did the work.
His life teaches us that civil rights are
not only about politics, but also about access
to opportunity in all forms.
Education, like voting, is a pathway to power.
(16:00):
Moses made it his mission to ensure that
the next generation had a seat at the
table.
No doubt, Moses showed us that the fight
for justice isn't just in the courtrooms or
the streets.
It's also in the classrooms.
Until next time, carpe diem.
(16:22):
Thank you for joining me at Math Science
History.
Please remember to subscribe to the show.
Also, if you could leave a rating or
a review, I would truly appreciate that.
Those ratings and reviews really help to increase
my listenership, which help me get more sponsors
and advertisers, which help me keep the podcast
up and running.
If you want to learn more about the
(16:43):
history of math and science, please visit me
at mathsciencehistory.com.
There, you can find the transcripts and additional
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(17:03):
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(17:25):
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(17:45):
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Until next time, carpe diem.
(18:20):
you
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) It's Black History Month, and we are still
celebrating black excellence.
This week, I am talking about one of
my favorite activists and mathematicians, Bob Moses.
His life and legacy made an indelible mark
on America's civil rights movement and math education.
Hi, I'm Gabrielle Burchak, and I have a
background in math, science, and journalism.
By the time you're done listening to this,
(00:21):
you will know a lot more about an
incredible individual who changed many lives.
In the year 415, the infamous philosopher and
mathematician, Hypatia of Alexandria, Egypt, was savagely murdered
by church monks.
(00:43):
This murder shocked the Roman community and its
government leaders.
Hypatia was known far and wide as a
respected philosopher, mathematician, government advisor, and a professor.
Hypatia, the sum of her life, is a
book that I wrote that looks not just
at the circumstances surrounding her death, but also
(01:03):
at the sum of her entire life.
I weave in the details of her education,
disciples, Neoplatonic philosophies, female contemporaries, and the many
mathematics that she wrote and taught about.
There is truly more to Hypatia's life than
her death.
Hypatia, the sum of her life, written by
me, Gabrielle Verchak, is now on sale on
(01:26):
Amazon.
Buy your copy today.
Today's podcast is about a person I've wanted
to talk about for a long time.
Robert Moses, also known as Bob Moses, realized
that math literacy is an extension of the
civil rights movement.
(01:46):
Math is more than about understanding numbers, science,
and data.
It is a tool for helping kids learn
a skill that empowers them in school, college,
and life.
I've always been inspired by Moses's story.
And before I start, I want to give
some context to this podcast.
I grew up in Denver, Colorado, where I
attended South High School.
(02:08):
Yay!
I was lucky to go there because it
was out of my district.
And what made the experience memorable was attending
a school with great diversity.
Our principal was Mr. Harold Scott, South's first
black high school principal.
He often held school assemblies that taught us
so much about black America's rich history, including
(02:30):
information about the civil rights movements in the
1960s.
And I really consider myself truly fortunate that
I received this education.
So after our assemblies, I would go to
the library and find a couple of books
that taught me more about the civil rights
movement.
So I was 15 years old when I
learned about Freedom Summer.
It was also known as Mississippi Freedom Summer
(02:53):
or the Freedom Summer Project.
It was organized and launched by the Council
of Federated Organizations, also known as the CFO,
which was an alliance of four primary civil
rights organizations.
These organizations included the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
also known as the SNCC, the Congress of
(03:13):
Racial Equality, also known as CORE, the National
Association for the Advancement of Color People, also
known as the NAACP, and the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, the SCLC.
Bob Moses was the field secretary of the
SNCC and the co-director of the CFO
and directed the Freedom Summer Project.
(03:34):
And I will go more into this later,
but for context, this is how I learned
so much about Bob Moses.
And I've been following his career ever since
I was in high school in the eighties.
I have always been inspired by his story,
his tenacity, and his ability to organize and
mobilize.
Bob Moses was born on January 23rd, 1935
(03:54):
in Harlem, New York.
His father, Gregory H.
Moses, was a janitor and his mom, Louise
Paris Moses, stayed home to raise the kids
in the Harlem River Houses, which was a
public housing complex.
In the projects, they had a small one
-room library that would open once a week
where his mom would go and gather a
couple of books for him.
(04:16):
So he was raised in a family that
loved him and encouraged education.
He grew up in a world where racial
segregation and inequality were deeply embedded in American
society.
However, unlike many civil rights leaders of his
time, Moses did not come from the South.
Instead, he was shaped by the urban struggle
(04:36):
of Black communities in New York.
He attended Stuyvesant High School, one of the
most prestigious public schools in the city.
From there, he went to Hamilton College, where
he studied philosophy and French.
In 1957, he earned a master's degree in
philosophy from Harvard University.
He had started his work on his PhD,
(04:57):
but his mother had passed away and his
father had to be hospitalized.
So in 1958, he returned to New York
to help his parents.
While in New York, he taught math at
Horace Mann School in the Bronx and tutored
math to private students.
Moses's journey could have easily led him to
a quiet life as an academic, but history
had other plans.
(05:17):
Inspired by the student sit-ins in the
South, Moses decided to join the growing civil
rights movement.
In 1960, Bob Moses became involved with the
SNCC, an organization led by young activists committed
to direct action against segregation.
Unlike some of the more prominent leaders of
the movement, Moses was known for his quiet,
(05:37):
strategic approach.
In 1961, he went to Mississippi, one of
the most dangerous places in the South for
a Black activist.
The state was notorious for its violent suppression
of Black voting rights.
Moses helped launch the Mississippi Voter Registration Project,
which worked to empower African Americans to exercise
their right to vote.
(05:58):
His work was about registering voters and shifting
the power dynamic.
He saw voting as the key to breaking
the cycle of oppression that kept Black communities
in poverty and political invisibility.
As I noted earlier, various organizations and civil
rights groups led the Mississippi Voter Registration Project.
It was created to empower Black citizens as
(06:19):
they were kept from voting.
At the time, the state governments would require
Black and African Americans to take literacy tests,
tax them at the polls, intimidate them, and
worse yet, beat them.
Mississippi was one of the most dangerous places
for civil rights activism.
White supremacist groups, local law enforcement, and state
(06:40):
officials used threats, arrests, and violence to prevent
Black voter registration.
In the 1960s, Mississippi was one of the
most dangerous places for civil rights activists.
And it still is.
In 2023, Mississippi presented a bill in the
Senate introducing restrictions on protests around the state
(07:01):
-owned buildings.
Even though it's been 60 years since the
civil rights movement, numerous states across the country
have governments that implement a range of discriminatory
practices and strive to disenfranchise Black voters and
other marginalized communities.
Some measures currently being implemented include strict voter
(07:21):
I.D. laws, reduction of early voting periods,
limitations on mail-in voting, and the purging
of voter rolls.
So, back to 1961.
When Moses went to Mississippi, he faced beatings,
arrests, and constant threats to his life.
His resilience and fortitude are extraordinary.
(07:42):
While he was in Mississippi, white segregationists, including
the police, were horribly violent towards the entire
organization, including Moses.
Once, when he was riding through Greenwood, Mississippi,
Klansmen shot at the car.
The driver was hit, but miraculously survived.
Nevertheless, Moses brought the car to a stop
(08:04):
and held the bleeding driver.
Another time, when he was assisting two Black
farmers during a voter registration drive and walking
them up the steps of a courthouse, Moses
was bashed in the head with a knife
handle by the cousin of the sheriff.
He was bleeding extensively but kept going up
the steps.
Only after he helped them register did he
(08:26):
reach out for medical help.
There wasn't a Black doctor in this specific
county, so he had to be driven to
another town where he received nine stitches in
his head.
I know this is a podcast about math
and science, but still, this story is important
because equality for marginalized communities is essential.
Moses worked so hard in these areas to
(08:48):
make sure that Black and African Americans received
their right to vote.
Sadly, one of the most tragic moments of
this period was the murder of three civil
rights workers that included James Chaney, Andrew Goodman,
and Michael Schwerner.
The Ku Klux Klan brutally killed them.
This act of terror only reinforced Moses' belief
(09:09):
that the fight for equality needed to be
waged on multiple fronts.
By the mid-1960s, his work contributed to
the eventual passage of the Voting Rights Act
of 1965, which outlawed discriminatory practices like literacy
tests and poll taxes.
But after years of activism, Moses withdrew from
(09:30):
public life.
He recognized that others who followed his example
were getting killed, and this weighed heavily on
him.
So, he sought refuge from the trauma and
intensity of the movement.
In 1966, Moses received a draft notification.
He was 31 years old.
The cutoff age for being drafted was 26,
(09:53):
which meant he was six years older than
the required age.
He was suspicious of this draft notice and
believed that it was the action of government
agents.
As a result, he moved to Canada, where
he stayed for a while.
Then, he moved to Tanzania, Africa, with his
wife, where he worked as a math teacher
for the Ministry of Education.
(10:14):
He remained in Tanzania until 1976, and then
returned to the U.S., eventually landing in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In the 1980s, while helping his daughter with
her math homework, he realized she was struggling
with the topic.
That's when he had an epiphany.
Math literacy was just as crucial as voting
(10:34):
rights had been in the 1960s.
In an interview with NPR, he is quoted
as saying, education is still basically Jim Crow
as far as the kids who are in
the bottom economic strata of the country.
He went on, explaining that no one knows
about them, no one cares about them.
And unfortunately, he is correct.
(10:55):
And this was made evident, especially during COVID,
when a lot of students who were in
the bottom economic strata of the country didn't
even attend classes.
In 1982, Moses received a fellowship with the
MacArthur Foundation.
This fellowship spurred him to start the Algebra
Project, a groundbreaking initiative to make math accessible
to students in underserved communities.
(11:17):
The project aimed to provide quality education as
a constitutional right for all students.
He saw math education as a new civil
rights issue, which was if black and low
income students were not given the tools to
succeed in math, they would be locked out
of future economic opportunities, particularly in STEM fields.
(11:39):
In 2002, the project received financial support from
the National Science Foundation.
Upon receiving this support, the project created a
benchmark for students who were in the bottom
quartile.
This benchmark was that they graduated high school
on time and were prepared to do the
college math required to graduate.
This approach is unique.
(12:00):
In a 1996 article in Smithsonian Magazine, the
author, Bruce Watson, writes, quote, the program begins
with gumdrops and toothpicks used to make geometric
constructs.
It moves on into subway trips with the
stops becoming positive and negative numbers, then into
narratives of the same trips and identification of
(12:22):
various points of interest.
These then are assigned symbols.
Students get involved, dealing with both abstractions and
practical logic.
At first, learning ratios by mixing lemonade, one
part sugar, three parts lemon juice, it sounds
simple minded, but it works.
In schools that use the Algebra Project, a
far higher number of students go on to
(12:43):
high school algebra than they ever did before,
and they do well, unquote.
Moses developed a unique approach to teaching algebra,
using real world experience to help students grasp
mathematical concepts.
He was able to turn math into action
and make it engaging and approachable, which in
turn made it accessible to a multitude of
(13:05):
students who benefit from it.
The Algebra Project is still in operation today,
and it continues to have such an incredible
influence.
The Algebra Project is based on three principles
that include, one, site development.
That's the work that the Algebra Project does
with the schools.
Two, research.
That's the research they conduct to implement math
(13:28):
literacy.
And three, professional development.
And that's the training they provide to teachers
to help make math approachable.
The Algebra Project isn't only about math, it's
about empowerment.
Moses believed that just as literacy had been
necessary for full citizenship in the 20th century,
math literacy was essential in the 21st century.
(13:50):
Without it, entire communities would be shut out
of economic and technological advancements.
The project now includes schools across the country,
reaching thousands of students.
It also inspires initiatives like the Young People's
Project, where high school students and college students
become math tutors and mentors for younger students.
(14:11):
To learn more about the Algebra Project, please
visit them at algebra.org.
Moses' vision went beyond traditional education reform.
He argued that the problem wasn't with the
students, it was with the system that failed
to equip them with the skills that they
needed to succeed.
His work challenged schools to rethink how they
(14:33):
taught math, making it more relevant and engaging
for students from all backgrounds.
Bob Moses continued his work with the Algebra
Project well into the 2000s, advocating for educational
reform and equity in math education.
Even as he aged, he remained deeply engaged
in the fight for justice.
He recognized that literacy, specifically in math, would
(14:56):
not be given.
Instead, proper education would be a challenge for
the Black communities to obtain, much like it
was a challenge to obtain voting rights during
the Civil Rights Movement.
On July 25, 2021, Robert Paris Moses passed
away at the age of 86.
His death was a significant loss, but his
(15:18):
legacy lives on in the thousands of students,
educators, and activists he inspired.
And oh, how he inspired.
Robert Paris Moses was a man of quiet
determination.
He was a strategist who believed in grassroots
empowerment.
Whether fighting for voting rights in Mississippi or
(15:39):
math literacy in classrooms, he never sought the
spotlight.
Instead, he simply did the work.
His life teaches us that civil rights are
not only about politics, but also about access
to opportunity in all forms.
Education, like voting, is a pathway to power.
(16:00):
Moses made it his mission to ensure that
the next generation had a seat at the
table.
No doubt, Moses showed us that the fight
for justice isn't just in the courtrooms or
the streets.
It's also in the classrooms.
Until next time, carpe diem.
(16:22):
Thank you for joining me at Math Science
History.
Please remember to subscribe to the show.
Also, if you could leave a rating or
a review, I would truly appreciate that.
Those ratings and reviews really help to increase
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up and running.
If you want to learn more about the
(16:43):
history of math and science, please visit me
at mathsciencehistory.com.
There, you can find the transcripts and additional
information to each topic, as well as additional
links to other sites.
Oh, and hey, if you like what you're
listening to and you like what you're reading,
please feel free to click on that cup
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(17:03):
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If you would like an early peek and
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Or, you can also subscribe to Math Science
History on Medium, where you can read an
(17:25):
early release of the podcast, which includes the
math.
Also, if you're interested in having me speak
at your school or your event, please visit
me at gabrielleberchak.com.
I would love to come share the world
of math, science, and history with you, your
audience, and your students.
(17:45):
Finally, if you're interested in leaving me a
comment or submitting a podcast topic, you can
always find me and Math Science History on
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Sky, or you can just search the Googley
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Until next time, carpe diem.
(18:20):
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