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Robert Moses Research Paper

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Robert Parris Moses became a math teacher at Horace Mann, a prestigious private high school, which began his activism in the civil rights for African Americans. While working at Mann in 1960, African Americans in the south began sit-ins, and demanded to be seated and served alongside whites at lunch counters. Moses recollected what he was thinking at the time in an interview, “Before, the Negro in the South had always looked on the defensive, cringing. This time they were taking the initiative” (Encyclopedia). Moses felt compelled to do something because he said “I had been troubled by the problem of being a Negro and at the same time being an American” (Encyclopedia). In June of 1960, at the age of twenty-five, Moses took a bus south to …show more content…

Moses returned to Mississippi, specifically McComb, after fulfilling his contract with Horace Mann and was appointed SNCC’s Mississippi field secretary. Moses’s weekdays were spent walking, door-to-door, to McComb’s African American citizens. On Sundays, Moses spoke in churches about his project for voter registration. Local high school students were recruited by Moses to help with voter registration. On August 7, 1961, Moses escorted four African Americans to the county registrar’s office and were registered. After more successful registrations, African American residences in nearby towns asked for his help as well. While bringing more African Americans to register to vote at the courthouse, Moses was severely beaten to the point that he needed eight stitches to close the wound, “Moses was struck down by a cousin of the local sheriff and beaten on the head until his face and clothes were covered with blood” (book). Moses continued to the registrar’s office, in a relaxed manner, only to be turned away. Moses pressed charges on his assailant, which was quickly acquitted, but demonstrated his policy of quiet perseverance. Taylor Brunch, a historian, explained how important Moses was to the Civil Rights Movement in an interview, “To this day he is a startling paradox, I think his influence is almost on par with Martin Luther King, and yet he 's …show more content…

In the spring of 1963, only six-thousand seven hundred out of the sixty thousand African Americans in Mississippi that were lined up outside of the courthouse were registered to vote. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged the all-white democratic party in the 1964 presidential convention. When Moses was asked about the current Democratic party, he responded, “Well, I don 't think that the Democratic Party to this day has confronted the issue of bringing into its ranks the kind of people that were represented by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party” (Americanswhotellthetruth). Moses said he thought that the Democratic Party only focused on the middle class and he and two others founded the MFDP to give the people who aren 't represented a voice, “The Democratic Party primarily has organized around the middle class. And we were challenging them not only on racial grounds but we were challenging them on the existence of a whole group of people who are the underclass of this country, white and black, who are not represented” (Americanswhotellthetruth). While on a highway, Moses was ambushed by a machine gun that hit his car and injured his partner which was also a SNCC worker, Moses also survived a violent attack by a police dog outside the City Hall in Greenwood. In an interview for Emerge Magazine, Moses

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