The Death of a Quiet Civil Rights Hero

Bob Moses — “the Martin Luther King Jr. of Mississippi” — has died at age 86. Nobody did more, or risked more, to register Black Americans to vote in the Deep South in the early 1960s. Moses was shot at, assaulted and jailed numerous times, but he kept his eyes on the prize “with an aura of almost saintly calm,” in the words of my sister Margaret Talbot.

Margaret wrote about Moses — the bespectacled son of a Harlem janitor who became a philosophy graduate student at Harvard before joining the civil rights struggle — in our new book, By the Light of Burning Dreams. After the traumatic murders in rural Mississippi of civil rights workers of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in June 1964, many leaders of Freedom Summer expected other young volunteers from Northern college campuses to cancel their plans to go South. As Margaret writes, Moses — one of the architects of the movement to galvanize civil rights action by placing middle-class students in harm’s way — addressed one such group (including future legendary organizer Heather Booth) with a heavy heart. Allow me to quote from this chapter in our book:

Bob Moses spoke to Heather’s group of Freedom Summer volunteers before they departed for Mississippi. He invoked the need to counter corrupt power with an unflagging commitment to advancing the good. He referred to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings -- in 1964, more of a cultish obscurity, but one that resonated with some of the students -- to describe how a hero “gains a means of ultimate power he does not want,” but can’t give up. Dressed, as he habitually was, in denim overalls, Moses looked down at his feet, and spoke in a voice so quiet the group had to listen intently to hear it. He told the students he felt terrible asking them to go. “Looking at us sitting in the same room where the 3 missing men had been last week,” one volunteer wrote to his father, “Moses seemed almost to be wanting all of us to go home.” Indeed, Moses stressed, anyone who wanted to should feel free to leave, and not be ashamed. They should know, though, that he wasn’t asking them to risk anything he himself wasn’t risking.

From the back of the room, a young woman began to sing: “They say that freedom is a constant sorrow.” And gradually, voice after voice joined in until everyone in the room was singing, their arms wrapped around one another. No one left.

Rest in peace, Bob Moses.

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