From the moment civil rights leader Robert P. Moses stepped to the podium Thursday night, the students and faculty members who crowded into Memorial Chapel seemed to hold their breaths.
Moses’s talk, titled “Quality Public School Education as a Constitutional Right,” served as the keynote address for the Martin Luther King Jr. celebrations that had been going on all week, and was filled with moving anecdotes that encouraged audience members to think deeper about the constitutional rights of all citizens.
In this fitting tribute to King, Moses – the Harvard-educated founder and president of the Algebra Project – spent much of his lecture tracing the history of the civil rights movement, beginning with a story about slave James Somerset seeking his freedom in England in the 18th century.
Moses’s discussion of the movement during the 1960s and 1970s, however, was riddled with personal experiences. At one point, Moses gave a graphic description of the “hailstorm of bullets” he faced as he grabbed the wheel of a Greyhound bus driving a group of sharecroppers to the polls.
Moses also chronicled the creation of the Algebra Project, one of his most celebrated achievements. He cited former Harvard President James B. Conant’s famous observation that “a caste system finds its clearest manifestation in an educational system.”
Such was the situation faced by Moses’s son and his classmates. Consequently, when his son’s friend announced that he wanted to do “their” math, referring to the math taught to white students, Moses began working with them to link the right questions and answers to “those pesky number lines.”
Thus, through a MacArthur Fellowship award, the Algebra Project was born. By the late 1990s, the project had spread to more than 200 middle schools across the country with the aim of guaranteeing quality education for every child in America, using math as a means of organizing.
Throughout his talk, Moses also emphasized that it’s the spirit of the “lived Constitution” that matters, not the “written Constitution,” meaning that the equal citizenship clause of the written Constitution doesn’t always transfer to all people as it should.
Whether this discrepancy exists in public education or voting, Moses encouraged all in attendance to change this, inviting his audience to recite the words to the preamble to the Constitution along with him as he wrapped up his speech.
Vice President and Dean of the College Keenan Grenell further added to the power of Moses’s message by adding a personal element in his closing remarks.
“It’s not often it gets this quiet [during a lecture. It means a lot to me because] I’m heir and legacy to the Mississippi sharecropping legacy you talked about,” he said.