Features
Hamilton history: Bob Moses ’56, a civil rights leader
By Jon Cohen ’17
September 25, 2015
The most important civil rights leader you’ve never heard of is a Hamilton alum.
Martin Luther King Jr. once called his leadership and charisma inspiring.
He was the logistical commander and emotional rock of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and with the committee helped organize the influential Freedom Summer Project of 1964.
At the 1964 Democratic National Convention he negotiated with then vice-presidential hopeful Hubert Humprey to award African-American voters from Mississippi the delegates to which they were entitled.
He has won many awards including the MacArthur Fellowship “genius grant” for founding the Algebra Project, an organization that works to improve math education in impoverished communities. He also won the Puffin National Prize for Creative Citizenship and holds an honorary degree from Swarthmore College.
In a 2007 interview, President Barack Obama said what inspired him to enter politics “was the civil rights movement. And if you asked me who my role model was at the time, it would be Bob Moses.”
Robert “Bob” Moses ’56 was born on Jan. 23, 1935 in Harlem, New York. A gifted student, Moses tested into the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, one of the best public schools in the country. When it came time to apply to colleges, Moses knew he wanted an academically rigorous institution where he could also play varsity basketball. But perhaps more importantly, as Moses told Hamilton professor Maurice Isserman in a 2002 interview, “I didn’t want to go to the South.”
From afar, Bob Moses seemed like the stereotypical Hamiltonian overachiever. He was president of the Philosophy Club, member of the Honor Court and the Emerson Literary Society, vice president of his senior class and captain of the basketball team. Moses’s summers were spent abroad in Japan and Europe on programs recommended by Hamilton professors. And just like students today, Moses admitted, “as a rule, I decided in my freshman year that I would only take courses from teachers that I liked, that I felt I could get along with.”
However, despite all of his accolades and success, Moses looks back at his years at Hamilton as a time of isolation and frustration. Moses was one of only a few black students on campus and told Professor Isserman it felt like he “was like walking around with the plague…your very presence infects the population.” When a roommate invited Moses to his house for Thanksgiving, the roommate’s parents said, “If you do that, your sister won’t be able to get a date.”
The racism at Hamilton was also institutionalized. At that time, black students could not join Greek life, which dominated social life on campus. Moses understood that the discrimination at Hamilton was far from unique, even among elite institutions in the Northeast, saying, “Hamilton was part of the country....There were people who were different…but the country was still living under Jim Crow, and Jim Crow had its tentacles all over the country. There wasn’t any way for Hamilton not to be part of that.”
White classmates understood and perhaps reinforced the division on campus, but many also realized Moses was special. One student, who was interviewed for a biography of Moses, recalled, “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.”
After Hamilton, Moses attended Harvard Graduate School where he earned a M.A. in philosophy. He then taught in New York City for several years before devoting the next several decades of his life to the Civil Rights Movement.
Moses is best known for his role in Freedom Summer, an aggressive plan to register black voters in Mississippi. During the project, which took place in the summer of 1964, Moses and many of his companions were beaten, arrested and threatened. During the turmoil Moses recalled his isolation at Hamilton, saying “one of the things that I learned to do at Hamilton served me in good stead when I went to Mississippi, and that was to keep a blank face.”
Moses returned to the Hill in 2002 to speak about his life. After the presentation, a student asked if he had been an “activist” while at Hamilton. Moses shook his head, saying that Hamilton was a conservative place in the 1950s and student activism was not encouraged like it is today. While perhaps not an activist yet, at Hamilton Moses demonstrated his exceptional perception of right and wrong. Moses refused to take part in freshmen hazing, which involved placing a recently painted toilet seat over the head of rebellious freshman. One classmate, Wayne Mahood ’56, recalled, “in his quiet style [he] tried not only to dissuade but to educate the rest of us.…He was simply practicing civil rights long before the rest of us came of age.”