And Gently He Shall Lead Them

Robert Parris Moses and Civil Rights in Mississippi

Eric Burner

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1994
• ISBN:
  9780814786307
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

"This moving account of a key figure in American history contributes greatly to our understanding of the past. It also informs our vision of the servant leader needed to guide the 1990s movement."
— Marian Wright Edelman, President, Children's Defense Fund

"First-rate intellectual and political history, this study explores the relations between the practical objectives of SNCC and its moral and cultural goals."
— Irwin Unger, Author of These United States and Postwar America

"Robert Moses emerges from these pages as that rare modern hero, the man whose life enacts his principles, the rebel who steadfastly refuses to be victim or executioner and who mistrusts even his own leadership out of commitment to cultivating the strength, self-reliance, and solidarity of those with and for whom he is working. Eric Burner's engrossing account of Robert Moses's legendary career brings alive the everyday realities of the Civil Rights Movement, especially the gruelling campaign for voter registration and political organization in Mississippi."
— Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities, Emory University, author of Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South

Next to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, Bob Moses was arguably one of the most influential and respected leaders of the civil rights movement. Quiet and intensely private, Moses quickly became legendary as a man whose conduct exemplified leadership by example. He once resigned as head of the Council of Federated Organizations because "my position there was too strong, too central." Despite his centrality to the most important social movement in modern American history, Moses' life and the philosophy on which it is based have only been given cursory treatment and have never been the subject of a book-length biography.

Biography is, by its very nature, a complicated act of recovery, even more so when the life under scrutiny deliberately avoids such attention. Eric Burner therefore sets out here not to reveal the "secret" Bob Moses, but to examine his moral philosophy and his political and ideological evolution, to provide a picture of the public person. In essence, his book provides a primer on a figure who spoke by silence and led through example.

Moses spent almost three years in Mississippi trying to awaken the state's black citizens to their moral and legal rights before the fateful summer of 1964 would thrust him and the Freedom Summer movement into the national spotlight. We follow him through the civil rights years — his intensive, fearless tradition of community organizing, his involvements with SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and his negotiations with the Department of Justice —as Burner chronicles both Moses' political activity and his intellectual development, revealing the strong influence of French philosopher Albert Camus on his life and work.

Moses' life is marked by the conflict between morality and politics, between purity and pragmatism, which ultimately left him disillusioned with a traditional Left that could talk only of coalitions and leaders from the top. Pursued by the Vietnam draft board for a war which he opposed, Moses fled to Canada in 1966 before departing for Africa in 1969 to spend the next decade teaching in Tanzania. Returning in 1977 under President Carter's amnesty program, he was awarded a five-year MacArthur genius grant in 1982 to establish and develop an innovative program to teach math to Boston's inner-city youth called the Algebra Project. The success of the program, which Moses has referred to as our version of Civil Rights 1992, has landed him on the cover of The New York Times Magazineemphasizing the new, central dimension that math and computer literacy lends to the pursuit of equal rights.

And Gently He Shall Lead Them is the story of a remarkable man, an elusive hero of the civil rights movement whose flight from adulation has only served to increase his reputation as an intellectual and moral leader, a man whom nobody ever sees, but whose work is always in evidence.

From his role as one of the architects of the civil rights movement thirty years ago to his ongoing work with inner city children, Robert Moses remains one of America's most courageous, energetic, and influential leaders. Wary of the cults of celebrity he saw surrounding Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X and fueled by a philosophy that shunned leadership, Moses has always labored behind the scenes. This first biography, a primer in the life of a unique American, sheds significant light on the intellectual and philosophical worldview of a man who is rarely seen but whose work is always in evidence.

ONE
“A LOT OF LEADERS”

Robert Parris Moses was born on January 23, 1935, and raised in Harlem, New York City. His grandfather, William Henry Moses, was a charismatic Baptist preacher who traveled throughout the South raising funds for the National Baptist Convention. William Moses was educated at Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg, where he met and married Julia Trent. He held pastorates in Knoxville, Tennessee; Newberry, South Carolina; Staunton, Virginia; Washington, D.C.; and Philadelphia.¹ He was also the author of several homiletic reviews for ministers and served a term as president of a four-year school to train black Baptist ministers in Guadalupe, Texas.²

Robert’s father, Gregory, frustrated by the struggle to survive during the depression, inculcated in the young Moses and his two brothers, Roger and Gregory, a drive to succeed where he had failed. They lived in the four-story Harlem River Projects, a small, contained complex with written exams to get in and a long waiting list.³ Moses’ father—unlike his brother, a college professor—was a janitor at the 369th armory in Harlem, an occupation Bob Moses has described as “a good job” (for the Depression) that “didn’t go anywhere.… That ate away at him, and I think he himself never expressed that in terms of frustration at society as a whole. It was frustration that led to drinking that led to difficult times in the family. There was a lot of that middle-class frustration—a whole generation of people who were intelligent, rooted in family, and industrious, for whom there was just no opportunity. You’d always hear, ‘It’s gonna be different when you grow up.’ So you had a slow buildup of frustration.”⁴

But perhaps both his father’s and his own frustration impelled Moses to apply himself more rigorously to make things different when he grew up. Moses entered Stuyvesant High School, a school for gifted New York City students who were admitted on the basis of competitive city wide examinations. Stuyvesant was liberal in politics and culture. Moses frequently attended hoot-enannies, folk-singers’ performances of a bohemian cast, mild precursors of the experimental and insurgent music of the 1960s. These, he has said, “helped orient me.”⁵ In his senior year at high school he was elected class president; he was also captain of the school baseball team. Moses graduated from Stuyvesant in June 1952, in the middle of his class academically.⁶

His parents pushed him in the direction of the good small liberal arts colleges and away from the traditional black schools, which they believed too “social.”⁷ His father in particular thought that he would get a better education and be forced to prove his mettle at a white college.⁸ Both parents were delighted when he won a scholarship to Hamilton College in upstate New York in the fall of 1952.⁹

At Hamilton, Moses was one of a few black students among upper-middle-class whites. It was not atypical for his classmates to respond that he was the first black person they had ever met when asked about Moses. One classmate speaks of the substantial difference between Moses and his peers “because so many of us had never really related to blacks in any significant way before. He lived … in some isolation.… Yet he was deeply, widely … universally respected.”¹⁰ A member of the honor court, co-captain of the basketball team where he exhibited “cool composure,” the elected vice president of his senior class, and a Rhodes Scholarship candidate, he gained a reputation for being quiet and unaffected. As part of his scholarship arrangement, he worked as a waiter in the nonfraternity dining hall.¹¹ Moses also served for two years as head of the student advisors to freshmen. Perhaps the most influential student group to which Moses belonged was the Emerson Literary Society (ELS), a residential social organization that exhibited an uncommon social consciousness. As one classmate remarked, “By today’s standards we were a largely racist, sexist, anti-semitic collection of white males. Fraternities completely dominated our social life and the Greeks didn’t offer membership to minority or Jewish students. It was Korea, Eisenhower, and 25 cents a bottle Utica Club beer.”¹² ELS was not the usual campus fraternal group: its members’ average grade, for example, exceeded that of any of the Hamilton Greek organizations. According to another ELS member, Moses “was very hesitant to join ELS, and it took considerable persuasion over two years before he agreed.”¹³ One Greek fraternity did try to pledge Moses, Tau Kappa Epsilon, but he declined, not wishing to be a token Negro in a Greek letter fraternity.¹⁴ For a time Moses served as the ELS rush chairman.

While only an occasional churchgoer during his youth, at St. Mark’s Church at 138th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue in New York City, at Hamilton Moses attended for a time a Christian study group, many of whose members were fundamentalists. He debated with his two freshmen Jewish roommates, fellow students from Stuyvesant High, about God’s existence, fairness, and justice, pitting Christian fundamentalism against their very different religious backgrounds.¹⁵ Moses considered entering the ministry and, as part of the college study group, even tried his hand at evangelical preaching on the streets of New York.¹⁶ He wrote to his father about entering the ministry; his father responded that the ministry was “a calling, not just an occupation.”¹⁷ His demeanor, as reserved as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.’s was ardent, did not suit the task. Yet it was later to be extraordinarily effective for the work of civil rights organizing, in which impassioned oratory usually dominated. And doubtless Moses’ experience as a novice preacher enabled him to respond to the religion of Mississippi’s rural blacks and to that of many of his peers in the early days of the movement. A fellow choir member at Hamilton stayed with Moses’ father when the group gave concerts in New York during his freshman year: “His father read the Bible during the evening, and I believe Robert was also very pious.”¹⁸

Hamilton was politically conservative. A poll in the mid-1950s found President Eisenhower favored by students over the Democratic spokesman Adlai Stevenson by a margin of three to one. And forty-five percent of the faculty at this northeastern liberal arts campus shared that preference,¹⁹ again reflecting the school’s relative conservatism. One student recalls, “My campaigning for Stevenson was generally taken as odd.”²⁰ Clarence Nixon, briefly head of the school’s political science department, had been a distinguished member of the circle known as the Southern Agrarians, champions of the traditional landed culture of the South. Named “Southerner of the Year” by the Mississippi Council for Christian Action while Moses was at Hamilton, Nixon had pleaded for Northern understanding of Southern problems as well as a change in race relations in the South.²¹

The college was not the traditional place to achieve a black identity: “Hamilton’s attitude was … it would admit black students who could handle the work academically, but that the college’s business was liberal arts education (as Hamilton understood it) and students who didn’t want what Hamilton had to offer should be elsewhere.”²² Elected to the sophomore honor society, Moses took no part in the minor hazing activities of the group toward freshmen—placing a new or recently painted toilet seat over the head of a transgressing freshman, for example—and “in his quiet style … tried not only to dissuade but to educate the rest of us,” a classmate recalls. “He was simply practicing civil rights long before the rest of us came of age.”²³ Yet the students’ focus and activities perhaps gave Moses some insight into what college students might be capable of doing when he would enlist their help some years later in Mississippi.

The atmosphere of the intellectually rigorous school can be described as genteel: “The tone was set by the boys from small towns and cities from upstate, many of them sons of teachers, ministers, and small businessmen.”²⁴ In Moses’ time Hamilton admitted about 175 students each year from an applicant pool of almost 1,000. In those days class attendance was mandatory, including Saturdays from 8:00 A.M to noon; skipping more than four during a semester without a wholly legitimate reason resulted inexorably in an F. Moses graduated with departmental honors in philosophy and a middle B average, which in those days placed him in the upper quarter of his class.

Moses encountered at Hamilton the Quaker pacifist beliefs that would illuminate his future career. Because he did well academically and showed an interest in things philosophical, his professors urged him to attend Quaker summer workshops abroad. After his junior year, Moses worked in Belgium with nine other volunteers to build a dormitory at a summer camp for underprivileged children in a mining district. In France, that same summer, he lived with pacifists whose commitment had been tested by Nazism, as racism was to test Moses. There in the Moselle region he helped to build houses for the homeless—hard manual labor, mixing cement, and pouring foundations. He met volunteers from Ceylon, West Africa, Egypt, and Jordan. He then traveled to a work camp near Bremen, Germany, operated by the American Friends’ Service Committee, and harvested potatoes for a missionary hospital.²⁵ The following summer he went to Japan, where he worked to construct a stairway at a home for mentally disturbed children and investigated Zen Buddhism. The American Friends’ Service Committee evaluated Moses as a “sociable, patient, and conscientious” young man who displayed “natural leadership.”²⁶

Coupled with his concrete experiences was the intellectual tutelage of Francis Tafoya, Marcel Moraud, and Frank Hamlin of Hamilton’s French Department. Under Tafoya, Moses read Albert Camus in what appears to have been a continuing pursuit of a spiritual absolute.

Whatever benefits Moses gained from Hamilton, he was to speak in a 1964 interview of being “deeply bitter about some of the realities of the campus and of the white attitude.” Dominated by whites, the message of higher education in the 1950s appeared to be saying: “Well, we have to do our part—the society has the overall problem, and our part as an educational institution is to try and open a door for two or three Negroes, and let’s see what happens.”²⁷ And yet Hamilton was racially progressive for its day. One fraternity during that time elected to pledge students outside of the white Christian pool and was promptly expelled from the national organization, its charter revoked.²⁸ The speaker at Moses’ commencement exercises on June 3, 1956, was Chief Justice Earl Warren, the author of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision of 1954. Hamilton also eventually recognized Moses’ achievements.²⁹

After graduation from college, Moses entered Harvard’s philosophy doctoral program and attended Quaker meeting in Cambridge, where he also worked part-time for nearly a year as a janitor in the meeting house.³⁰ At Harvard, Moses’ focus was on analytic philosophy, which was well-suited to his penchant for mathematics, and he was awarded a Master of Arts in June 1957. His mother’s death from cancer at forty-three, in February 1958, shortly after her first vacation with her husband,³¹ interrupted Moses’ doctoral studies, and he withdrew from Harvard the following month. Though the children suspected her condition, Louise Parris Moses had not permitted her husband to tell them about her illness. As he prepared to return to Harvard, Moses learned that his father, while retracing the steps he had taken to bury his wife, had hallucinated and been committed to Bellevue Hospital psychiatric ward, the victim of a breakdown brought on by despair.³²

Moses did not return to Cambridge for two decades. He remained in New York to be near his father, who eventually recovered and returned to work. To pay for living expenses, Moses took a job from 1958 to 1961 teaching mathematics at Horace Mann, a prestigious private high school. During this period he took up folk dancing, and he traveled to Maine to attend a folk dance camp in the spring of I960.³³ Later Moses would include such activities in group and staff gatherings—a much-needed antidote for the constant tension civil rights workers experienced. His uncle describes him during these years as being a “kindhearted, good-spirited” young man always “sympathetic to the needs of others.”³⁴

To supplement his income, Moses became a private tutor in 1958 to a fourteen-year-old black singer, Frankie Lyman. The job required travel by bus to the black communities of various cities, and Moses soon developed a sense of the emergent black ghettos and the penalties of urban segregation.³⁵ Mississippi in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the rural South generally, was rife with rumors of the delights Chicago or New York cou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “A Lot of Leaders”
• 2. “To ’Uncover What Is Covered’”
• 3. “This Is Mississippi, the Middle of the Iceberg”
• 4. “Food for Those Who Want to Be Free”
• 5. “One Man—One Vote”
• 6. Young American Revolutionaries
• 7. Freedom Summer
• 8. “To Bring Morality into Our Politics”
• 9. Disillusion and Renewal
• Notes
• Index