Robert Parris Moses, a civil rights activist who was jailed
for leading black voter registration drives in the southern states of the United
States during the 1960s, has died at the age of 86.

Moses worked against segregation as the Mississippi field
director of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee during the civil
rights movement and was central to the 1964 “Freedom Summer” in which hundreds
of students went to the South to register voters.

He founded the Algebra Project in 1982 with the help of a
MacArthur Fellowship. The project included a curriculum Moses developed that helped
improve minority education in math.

The news of his death was confirmed by Ben Moynihan, the
director of operations for the Algebra Project, who said he had talked to Moses’s
wife.

Born in Harlem, New York, on January 23, 1935, he was the
grandson of William Henry Moses, a prominent Southern Baptist preacher and a
supporter of Marcus Garvey, a Black nationalist leader in the early 1900s. He
was born two months after a race riot left three dead and injured 60 in his
neighbourhood.

Moses became a Rhodes scholar while studying at Hamilton
College in Clinton, New York. Moses then took part in a Quaker-sponsored trip
to Europe and solidified his beliefs that change came from the bottom up before
earning a master’s in philosophy at Harvard University.

“I was taught about the denial of the right to vote behind
the Iron Curtain in Europe. I never knew that there was (the) denial of the
right to vote behind a Cotton Curtain here in the United States,” Moses had
said.