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| Bob Moses, Founder & President, The Algebra Project |
Sunday, January 15
2–3:30 pm, Rollins Chapel
Bob Moses, founder of The Algebra Project and director of Freedom Summer, the major voting registration effort of the civil rights movement, will deliver the address at Dartmouth’s annual MLK Community Faith Celebration. Also featuring performances by the Dartmouth Glee Club, World Percussion Music Ensemble, and Rockapellas.
Today's service is planned and hosted by the William Jewett Tucker Foundation, and is co-sponsored by the Departments of African & African-American Studies, Mathematics, and History, and by the Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Planning Committee.
As a field secretary for Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Bob Moses initiated its Mississippi Voter Registration Project in 1961. Three years later, with Medgar Evers of the NAACP, David Dennis of the Congress of Racial Equality, and Aaron Henry of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he revitalized and led the Council of Federated Organizations’ Mississippi Summer Project—Freedom Summer—the historic movement to end racial disenfranchisement in the American South.
Having been denied conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War, Moses served as a teacher with Tanzania’s Ministry of Education for a number of years before returning to the U.S. He then used a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” to initiate the Algebra Project, which employs mathematics as an organizing tool to work toward providing a high-quality public education for all American students. Through research and school and community development, the Algebra Project works to change the deeply rooted social attitudes that encourage the disenfranchisement of a third of our nation’s population, building instead a demand for and support of high-quality public schools. Moses is currently serving as a visiting fellow at Princeton’s Center for African American Studies.
