Bob Moses

Bob Moses stood in a Mississippi field, talking with an old Negro man. Suddenly a fellow worker for the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee came running up. "Come on in, Bob," he shouted. "The Justice Department is on the phone."

Moses looked up for a moment. "I'll be in when I'm through here," he said quietly and returned to his conversation.

Robert P.Moses, the 28-year-old director of the Mississippi Freedom Project, is a civil rights leader who does not want to be a leader. He describes himself simply as an "organizer" and when asked about himself, always brings the conversation around to what is going on in Mississippi. He refuses to be made a leader not because of shyness--although Moses is shy--but because he believes that the people must lead themselves. "The trouble with most leaders," he says, "is that they care less about people than they care about being able to make decisions for people.

"The Freedom Democratic Party challenge at the Democratic Convention meant the entrance of people into politics. They were not politicians--not sophisticated or educated--just people. They were realizing that they could have something to say about their lives. With this realization came a release of energies. That is what revolution means--not what you tear down but what you "clease."

The freedom to shape their destiny is denied to most Americans white or black. Moses feels. "The people in this country are so fragmented by the society that they come to feel that they are workers first, and human beings second.

"For Mississippi Negroes, the greatest freedom they're ever likely to have in this society is the freedom they get when they join the Movement, when they decide they're not going to worry about losing their jobs, or having their homes bombed, or going to jail."

Perhaps it was this freedom that made Robert Moses, a former Harvard graduate student, leave his teaching job in a New York private school in 1960 and head south. His immediate inspiration was a picture of the student sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina.

A few months later, he was sitting in a Negro farmhouse in the Mississippi Delta region, planning a voter registration campaign. He left the state for a year, but returned the following summer to set up a voting project in McComb-the first in the state and a model of the thirty such projects presently operating there. He has been in Mississippi ever since.

As Moses was the first civil rights worker to venture into the "worst state," so he led the way into what is probably the "worst county" in the "worst state." When he accompanied two Negroes to register at the Amite County courthouse, Moses was attacked on the street by a white, who hit him repeatedly with the butt end of a knife.

"I remember very sharply that I didn't want to go immediately back into McComb because my shirt was very bloody and I figured that if we went back in we would probably frighten everybody," he recalls. So, Moses washed up before heading back to McComb. He later required eight stitches to close his head wound.

If Moses does not seem to fit the role of leader, he fits beautifully the role of teacher. He talks very quietly, very slowly, and very deliberately. "Ask Bob a question and you think he hasn't heard, the answer is so slow in coming," his father says.

Moses squats on his haunches as he thinks, his head resting on his hand. When he replies, he does it almost reluctantly, as though his memories are too painful to recall. Often, the answers are simply new and deeper questions which he poses to the questioner and to himself. He smiles little, and his voice seldom varies from a low monotone.

As he talks, Moses continually returns to a single theme: people are more important than systems. Discussing his proposal that the Federal government should seek a more equitable basis for selecting Federal grand juries, he declares, "The big question is whether the government is willing to probe into our whole system of law, whether it is willing to weigh its concept of law and the sanctity of the Federal system against the lives of the people being killed in Mississippi."

He fuses idealism and politics in a unique way--thrusting the civil rights movement into partisan politics without compromising principles. When Bayard Rustin suggested at a staff meeting during the Democratic Convention that the movement had shifted from the moral sphere into the political sphere, where it would have to accept compromises, Moses disagreed. "We came to the convention not to inject politics into civil rights, but to inject rights into politics," he said. The compromise was rejected.

He replies to legal questions by discussing the beatings and killings which he knows so much better. At a press conference in Cambridge, a reporter asked what precedent there was for trying to change the jury selection system.

"What precedent is there for murder, for bombing, for harassment--the Civil War?" Moses answered quietly.