How does one choose what to read after War and Peace? During those priceless months of immersion in Moscow, Borodino and places between, I was compiling book recommendations from friends and reading intriguing book reviews, pondering my eventual reentry into the world of good, but not great. As you might guess, I knew it would have to be something short, and probably not a novel, to reduce the risk of unfair comparisons.
When I was still in the early chapters of W&P, some friends recommended a book called The White Peril by Omo Moses. These dear friends were a central part of our Mississippi years, so they knew that this book would have instant appeal for me because the author is the son of Bob Moses, one of the giants of the Civil Rights Movement, whose courageous actions were part of what inspired us to head south after graduate school.
Even for someone like Bob, fame is fleeting, so he’s likely a stranger to many of you or, at best, a barely recognizable name. So, let me pause here to outline his story, which is intricately woven into the text of this book. Bob was a graduate student in Harvard’s math department when the sit-ins began in 1960. Their example led him to suspend his studies (to which he returned many decades later) and volunteer in the offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference under the guidance of Ella Baker, whose brilliant strategizing led, among other things, to the creation of SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
Baker sent Bob on a journey through the South to connect with local leaders to enlist them in voter registration efforts. These connections with local giants like Amzie Moore in Cleveland, Mississippi who were the real backbone of the Movement, inspired Bob to move to McComb to initiate a voter registration project in this difficult and dangerous part of the state. What followed were years of arrests, beatings and murders in the course of breaking the stranglehold of fear in the state and throughout the South, leading to the historic federal legislation outlawing segregation and opening the polling booths to Black voters.
For Moses, his last name, with all its Biblical associations, became a burden, so he changed it toParris, his mother’s maiden name. He believed deeply that local people were the heart of the Movement, not outsiders elevated to roles as historic icons. In addition, the late 60s was a period of catastrophic assassinations. Bob, depleted by the years of dangerous living and fearing for his life, fled with his new wife to Tanzania where Omo (full name Omowale) and two of his three siblings were born. Some of the most stunning writing in the book consists of childhood recollections of his African life, a sharp contrast to the life in Cambridge, Mass where Bob moved his family when Omo was 8 to resume his Ph.D. work at Harvard.
There’s a reason the book is subtitled A Family Memoir because from here forward Bob’s story and that of Omo, his siblings and his mother, become inseparable. He even discovers the writings of his great-grandfather, a radical Baptist preacher whose sermons and writings are interspersed throughout the book.
While Omo and his brother Taba are discovering the attractions and dangers of Black life in urban America, Bob is beginning to draw together the seemingly disparate threads of his math training and his organizing history, eventually resulting in the creation of The Algebra Project. After studying the academic trajectory of most Black students, Bob recognizes that if students do not take algebra by eighth grade, they are forever off track in pursuing many higher education objectives.
In the book brilliantly titled Radical Equations, Charlie Cobb, another founding member of SNCC, after producing the best summary I know of Movement history, recounts Bob’s beliefs about how the Algebra Project can become an organizing vehicle for Black liberation. Although the Project became a national effort, Bob came full circle and concentrated his efforts on schools in Mississippi. Omo, after a successful college basketball career but unclear about where to go next, joined his father and his brother Taba in Jackson, MS. to become math literacy workers. Some of the most powerfully etched moments in the book center on that work, which lead Omo to a decades-long career heading The Algebra Project and an organizing offshoot called the Young People’s Project. Bob died in 2021, but I’m sure he was proud of the legacy he left in Omo’s hands, which later passed on to some of the younger siblings in the Moses family.
I had the privilege of meeting some of the alumni of The Algebra Project and the Young People’s Project on visits to Jackson in 2017 and 2018. They embodied the success of Bob’s belief in the connection between math and organizing. Their lives were built around improving the lives of children and adults in the city’s Black community, just as Bob, Omo and Taba had dreamed. I don’t know enough to say whether the work has been equally successful elsewhere.
It pains me to discover that this book was never reviewed in the New York Times or in most other mainstream media. It’s beautifully written and masterfully organized, interweaving Omo’s narrative, his great-grandfather’s sermons, Charlie Cobb’s interviews with Algebra Project students and excerpts from interviews with Bob about his voter registration work in McComb and elsewhere. I hope I’ve recruited at least a few more readers. The book deserves more.
