When I first met Bob Moses, I was potentially too eager to meet him. For years, his book Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project had taken over several facets of my pedagogical imagination, from how I taught students about integers (even when I couldn’t take them on trips myself) to slopes and equations. Not only did I have the privilege of meeting civil rights and Black liberation activists who were living legends like Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, and Felipe Luciano, I also found tutelage in educational giants like Pedro Noguera, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Karen Lewis. But one man – among a handful – sat at the intersection of the fight for civil rights and education. Friends and acquaintances across the board would relay stories about him, encouraging me to find him whenever I got the opportunity.
That, I did. But before I would, I had the pleasure of sitting in the audience for a panel with him and several luminaries as part of the American Education Research Association’s conference in NYC, 2018.
Everything people had to say about him was correct: both the gentleness and fierceness wrapped in struggle and hope. Rather than relay what he said, I’ll just share the video (above) of his remarks and discussion with fellow panelists. When the panel ended, I bum-rushed the stage to meet him. Of course, a small clutter already surrounded him, but I didn’t let that deter me. When it was my turn, I just said, “Thank you for everything you’ve done. You’ve had an immeasurable effect on my work as a teacher and activist, so thanks.”
OK, it probably wasn’t as eloquent, but I did ask him for a picture and told the amateur photographer: “I need this picture! This is my OG and he doesn’t even know it!” He let out a small chuckle and still took a few pictures with me for posterity. It was the first and last time I’d get to meet him. More recently, I was the opening speaker for the NCTM annual conference where he would be on a closing panel until he pulled out for personal reasons. In his absence, his co-panelists including the actor/activist Danny Glover asked us to dispel the current myths about educational justice, including current deleterious notions about the origins of public schooling for our Black and brown children.
Even when he was among us in the physical, it was evident that we were ill-equipped in some ways to meet the current challenges for both civil rights and educational justice. Now that he has risen as one of our ancestors, I always hope we can grab those lessons and apply them to our current context.
A few hours ago, my wife asked, pointedly, “Why don’t we hear more about him in our schools?” It’s a great question. People like me who’ve elevated his messages of mathematics as a key to 21st-century citizenship will have influenced thousands of people across the country (and the world?) to take up the mantle. Unfortunately, the educational zeitgeist generally fears authentic conversations about equity, even before local and state governments took on so-called “critical race theory” laws. Teaching the concentrated truth as a way forward has rarely been the objective of American educational institutions, especially in our math classrooms where decontextualized axioms still reign supreme over deep, contextual problem-solving.
The mere mention of alternative math histories seems to bring out the anxious conservative out of both-sides faux-moderates. Imagine telling the narrative of a Black kid from the projects who attended one of New York’s lauded institutions only to leave his teaching job to organize Black voters in Mississippi to students of similar circumstance. That’s misaligned with the centuries-long story of the American Dream. Telling children that they can actually do something with their education besides leave the hood doesn’t align with the saviorism that continues to pervade among inner-city Black and brown schools. There have been few instances in my lifetime when someone in the education space would mention his work in both civil rights and math education with equal clarity and intensity.
As if saving us from our squalor mattered more than deconstructing why that squalor exists, especially and disproportionately for Black children.
To mention Bob Moses would mean to mention Ella Baker and the hundreds of quiet-yet-pronounced and community-rooted organizers of the 1960s whose tales America can’t dilute, including several of his colleagues who died at the hands of white supremacist violence. It would mean to pull in the lessons of the Algebra Project, an organization that’s meant the world to thousands of students across the country who have carved spaces for belonging in math and their communities. It would mean to acknowledge the work so many of his intellectual descendants in several spaces, too many to name in this reflection surely.
He was a genius prior to the MacArthur Award for sure.
As someone who sought inspiration from the blueprint he left, I’m left with a plethora of questions. What better problems did he leave us with? As I read obits and social media posts about him, I see how he left gifts for each of us. Selfishly, I see his birthday, exactly a day and several years before mine. I read up on his upbringing, his education, and how he took a left from a path that usually leads folks like us out of the projects, opting instead to go into teaching and then organizing in the quiet and even more perilous places. Shaking his hand and getting the chuckle and affirmation that he knew what “OG” meant was enough for me to feel like I was on the right path with my own work.
But then I think about how I wish more people in the education field felt a similar possession about his story. His social-justice orientation to the world and to Black people in this country should serve as an exemplar for what we want “real life math” to look like rather than the clamor for … whatever it is people think they’re doing with education right now. It’s not enough to have students in pre-service to learn Bob Moses. It’s that we should laud folks like him and so many others as regularly as possible, especially in places where our students could use more mirrors, and the better problems he’s left for us to solve.
May his legacy grow like latticework wherever we pursue justice in education and, by extension, justice in our society. May everyone be as fierce in their resolve and let our giants alive and past teach us the way forward.