Robert Parris Moses

A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots

Laura Visser-Maessen

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781469666501, 9781469627984
• eBook ISBN: 9781469627991
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

One of the most influential leaders in the civil rights movement, Robert Parris Moses was essential in making Mississippi a central battleground state in the fight for voting rights. As a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Moses presented himself as a mere facilitator of grassroots activism rather than a charismatic figure like Martin Luther King Jr. His self-effacing demeanor and his success, especially in steering the events that led to the volatile 1964 Freedom Summer and the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, paradoxically gave him a reputation of nearly heroic proportions. Examining the dilemmas of a leader who worked to cultivate local leadership, historian Laura Visser-Maessen explores the intellectual underpinnings of Moses’s strategy, its achievements, and its struggles.

This new biography recasts Moses as an effective, hands-on organizer, safeguarding his ideals while leading from behind the scenes. By returning Moses to his rightful place among the foremost leaders of the movement, Visser-Maessen testifies to Moses’s revolutionary approach to grassroots leadership and the power of the individual in generating social change.

Chapter One: The Making of a Mind

Two months after Robert Moses was born in Harlem on January 23, 1935, a race riot erupted that left three dead, some sixty injured, and seventy-five arrested. Although it started over a rumor that a white policeman had killed a black youth, the New York Times held the Depression’s “many economic ills” accountable. The black Amsterdam News went further, blaming “the discrimination, exploitation and oppression of 204,000 American citizens in the most liberal city in America,” New York.¹

Since World War I, Harlem had functioned as the so-called mecca of the New Negro, an exciting place for cosmopolitan-minded and race-conscious blacks that attracted thousands of migrants and immigrants. As of 1930, only 21.2 percent of Manhattan’s blacks had been born there. The rest were foreign born or born elsewhere in the United States, with nearly 50 percent of the latter coming from the South. Between 1916 and 1930, 1.6 million southern blacks moved north in what became known as the Great Migration. Another 5 million followed between 1940 and 1970, seeking to find their fortune in northern industrial jobs as their farms suffered from credit loss and natural disasters, such as flooding and the boll weevil, and to escape increased racial animosity. After Booker T. Washington’s death and much of his constituency’s move northward, the focus of black leadership also shifted to the North. Harlem emerged as the political capital of black America. Its heavy concentration of black activism included NAACP headquarters, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, and A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The center of a new black cultural “renaissance,” Harlem’s institutions such as jazz clubs and social and literary organizations flourished as well, drawing even a large white clientele.²

This expansion was dramatic. As in most northern cities, housing segregation had firmly been encoded in New York. Blacks accordingly could not rent outside Harlem’s edges. Within its perimeters, landlords kept blacks’ rents artificially high, while white storeowners did the same with food prices. Consequently, adequate minimum incomes needed to be higher than in the rest of the city, leading to overcrowding and higher crime rates. In the 1920s, Harlem became a slum in every sense of the word, but its internal divisions, based on class and nativity, prevented united protest. By the time the riot broke out in 1935, conditions had worsened. Due to the Great Depression, 60 percent of Harlem’s population was unemployed, and those with jobs faced severe wage cuts.³

After the riot, the city government realized it needed to invest in the neighborhood. One means was building four-story public housing projects, the Harlem River Houses, which opened in 1937. In total, 574 black families out of 11,500 applicants could rent a small apartment at $7 a room per month. The project had a nursery school, health clinic, and laundry facilities. The tenants chosen, mostly unskilled or semi-skilled workers, needed an average family income of $1,340. Among them were Bob Moses, his parents Gregory H. and Louise Parris Moses, and his older brother Gregory. In 1941, the family was extended with another son, Roger.⁴

MOSES’S FAMILY HISTORY was also rooted in the Great Migration and the proud black self-help tradition that thrived in places like Harlem. His grandfather, William Henry Moses, was a prominent southern Baptist preacher whose career reflected a strong affiliation with black-led initiatives for social change. He was educated at Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg and was a one-term president of Guadalupe College for Baptist ministers in Texas, both strong black independent institutions founded to counter black moderates’ cooperation with white Baptists. He also became the vice-president of the predominantly black National Baptist Convention, then the nation’s third largest religious organization. Unsurprisingly, William Moses was a supporter of Marcus Garvey, although Pan-Africanism was not regularly discussed in his home. In 1925, he gained national stature for his progressive views regarding the controversial Scopes trial,⁵ which he attended.⁶

Grandfather Moses wrote homiletic reviews and held pastorates in the South, in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, to advance his family into the middle class. The ancestry of his wife, Julia Trent, went back to a white plantation owner’s son, Peter Trent, from Cumberland, Virginia. The Moses couple eventually settled with their six children in New York, where Grandfather Moses’s church did well. This allowed his children to attend good schools.⁷

Shortly after the move, however, William Moses fell ill. Moses’s father, the fourth in line, helped his mother maintain the household. After bell hopping at fancy hotels in Saratoga, Gregory Moses accepted a steady blue-collar job at Harlem’s 369th Armory. Maintaining he got “shortchanged,”⁸ he always looked enviously at his older brothers. One, William (Uncle Bill), a Pennsylvania State College graduate, worked in New York as an architectural draftsman, designed buildings in Virginia, and then taught courses at the state’s black Hampton Institute. Uncle Bill was Moses’s only immediate family member living in the South.⁹ Another brother, DeMaurice, a former lawyer who had attended Columbia University, was a lieutenant colonel. He had led a black battalion in the Pacific during World War II. Afterward, he became commander of the 369th Armory, where Gregory worked as a maintenance man. He and his wife, Aunt Doris, sent their children through expensive schools and into Harvard and Yale. Gregory’s strong and independent-minded sisters, Ethel, Lucia, and Julia, were—against their father’s wishes—in show business. Their careers spanned the renowned Cotton Club Girls lineup, touring the globe with Broadway shows, and acting in Black cinema.¹⁰, ¹¹

Gregory Moses had only completed high school. Until his marriage in 1932, he lived with his father. His wife, Moses’s mother, Louise Parris, grew up in Jamaica, Long Island, the daughter of a domestic worker in Queens. Louise graduated from high school as well, a feat she was very proud of. She, “the prettiest thing on 111th Avenue in Jamaica,” was making plans to go to college when Gregory, the family story went, “snapped her up.” Gregory did not want Louise to work when the children were young, although she had cherished her previous job at Chock Full of Nuts, a coffee chain Jackie Robinson helped to market in New York’s black neighborhoods. “She was proud of how she managed her counter and her regular customers,” Moses recalled. Consequently, life was difficult for the Moses family, even though having a steady job during the Great Depression made one part of the black middle class, and the move to the public housing projects was considered an improvement in the black community. Gregory even dipped into his pension to make sure his family could celebrate Christmas and Easter every year.¹²

When the nation recovered through the wartime economic boom, blacks hardly profited. Whites worked in the thriving defense industries, but many of its jobs were closed to blacks. When Harlem subsequently experienced another race riot in 1943, the then eight-year-old Moses “knew what was going on but didn’t have a clue about what it meant.” Peering out their fourth-floor living room window with his mother and older brother, he just watched a “sea of young black boys” and was not able to “see the end of them as they flowed with an unrelenting roar on the street” below.¹³

Moses’s sense of the war itself was just as basic, which was reflected in the games he played outside the housing projects with his brothers and neighborhood friends. They marched to the commands of one of them, or they each pretended to be a country, threw a ball in the air, and whoever it hit could then declare war on another “country” and that person had to fetch the ball. Rather than on freedom and democracy, his understanding of the war’s significance mostly centered on the issue of scarce goods. He regularly stood in long lines to get rationed products like margarine and sugar and listened to his aunts complain about the lack of nylon stockings. Because his father could not afford to attend the pricy local grocery stores, twice a month Moses, his mother, and older brother had to walk several miles to the nearest A&P in Brooklyn—trips they had to continue for the remainder of his childhood.¹⁴

Throughout the forties, the Moses family experienced hardship. Like most in Harlem, it had to find ways of supplementing the family income to survive. Moses, his mother, and brothers therefore sold milk from a black-owned cooperative in the housing projects before school. If they were lucky and sold two boxes, they could buy two quarts of milk for themselves. As teenagers, Moses and his brother delivered laundry in the housing projects as well to supplement the family’s income. These early encounters with self-help impressed young Moses deeply. Harlem was filled with such examples, especially by the black church and other black self-help organizations. The co-op experience gained in significance as Moses grew older. “It later made a very deep impression as I learned more about the whole process of setting up businesses and the problems of black people in getting started in the economy in this country.”¹⁵

Harlem’s black culture thus introduced Moses to a type of activism that stressed self-empowerment, although he did not adopt the language of its most well-known institution, the black church. Church did not play a traditional role in his early life, but he neither rejected his Baptist family background. Many migrants from the South did not feel at ease in northern black churches due to the sobriety of their services, which contradicted the emotional southern rural way of holding mass, and the hostility that some congregants displayed toward newcomers. Consequently, migrants often left, shopped around for other churches, or started new ones. Practicing religion, like everything in the North, became a more fluid experience.¹⁶

Consequently, while Grandfather Moses and Grandma Johnson, Moses’s grandmother on his mother’s side, lived for the church, neither of Moses’s parents attended church. While religious themselves, they chose not to push institutionalized religion on their sons’ lives, although Moses attended Sunday school occasionally. Nonetheless, Moses was influenced by his Uncle Bill’s stories about the small Universalist church he attended in Hampton. Having always been interested in what he would “loosely call spiritual notions,” Moses adopted a loose approach to religion that allowed him to evade dogmatic denominational entanglements while remaining open to nonconventional forms of Christianity later in life.¹⁷

Rather than on biblical doctrine, Moses based the hallmarks of his later activist philosophy—agency, ownership in learning, grassroots leadership, the inherent worth of each man, self-determination, careful listening, and an identification with the working class—on those around him. Notions of community and racial solidarity were central in the lives of those Moses associated with during his childhood. Even the Harlem River Houses themselves were designed to foster the sense of community and black self-help that he found admirable and sought to emulate throughout his life. For example, vigilant adults living in the Projects once returned the abandoned tricycles of Moses and his brother Gregory to their apartment, albeit to the wrong one. Another neighbor organized a baseball team, the only organized black team in town that entered tournaments. Moses was a member, and his father, who attended every game, served as the players’ mentor. The team had their own outfits and traveled to the tournaments on city buses with funds raised by themselves. From fourth grade onward, Moses played baseball with the team every summer, and during the winter he participated in organized basketball at the YMCA.¹⁸

Particularly the members of Moses’s immediate family served as social consciousness-raising examples who proudly and unmistakably espoused these ideals, leaving an indelible impression on Moses as he grew up. He admired his Uncle Bill, who headed the NAACP in Hampton, Virginia, and in the 1930s had played in an integrated theater production but refused to accept lower wages than his white coworkers. During the war, he had organized a petition for integration of the armed forces, which he sent to President Roosevelt, and the police once escorted Moses’s Aunt Ethel out when she protested against the Nazis at a German Bund meeting in Madison Square Garden. But the importance of human dignity and agency also became apparent to him through smaller instances. It, for example, deeply affected Moses to witness the great pains his Aunts Lucia and Julia took to have their mother Julia Trent’s family established as “legitimate,” since she was the descendent of a slave and one of the white slave master’s sons. During an emotional scene in Moses’s home, Julia referred repeatedly to a court document that listed Julia Trent’s mother as wife—not property—of the slave master’s son to emphasize her personhood and dignity.¹⁹, ²⁰

Politics were never distant. Moses mentioned that in his grandmother’s “kitchen there was always this running conversation about the state of the country. Even when my aunts talked about big names like Lena Horne or Duke Ellington whom they had worked with, [it] was really political dialogue about other Black talent they knew who were unable to emerge.” When Jackie Robinson began to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, Moses’s father, a huge fan of the Giants’ white right fielder Melvin Ott, instantly switched allegiance to Robinson and the Dodgers. The twelve-year-old Moses immediately grasped that “something momentous had taken place.” He came to understand that the debates in his family carried an important message. “[T]heir discussions were like one long discussion on the larger issue of race. Inevitably they would turn to me. ‘You’re going to be whatever you want to be.’”²¹

Above all, Moses learned from observing his father. While Gregory Moses’s Armory post was considered a worthy job, he derived little satisfaction from it; his main activities included operating switchboards and shoveling snow. Like him, 50 percent of Harlem blacks worked in the service sector, but those were generally jobs without further career prospects. Gregory’s frustrations grew when his brother became the Armory’s commander. This, Moses disclosed, “ate at him,” but he “never expressed [such personal issues] in terms of frustration at society as a whole.” Instead, he became an alcoholic. Although alcoholism was a common problem in the black community, most considered it a personal shortcoming. According to Moses’s neighborhood friend Alvin Poussaint, he never spoke about his father’s drinking but never hid the fact. The drinking affected everyone in the family. “It was hard, it was hard on my mother,” Moses admitted, “What it means is that we can’t count on him.”²²

Yet being funny and “in some sense gregarious,” Moses saw in his father a “working class public speaker” who demonstrated that anyone who lacked an education could nonetheless be politically perceptive. At parent teacher meetings, Gregory would be the first to stand on his feet, and he would deliberately include his sons in his social encounters with the people in his personal network, such as family members, associates of Uncle Bill, and colleagues. Young Moses loved these meetings, which he said taught him how to listen. Such exchanges were “not just gossip talk. [They’re] talking about issues of the day … related to the job and how it i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Making of a Mind
• Chapter Two: A Movement Education
• Chapter Three: You Killed My Husband
• Chapter Four: The Bob Moses Mystique
• Chapter Five: A New Dimension
• Chapter Six: Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t
• Chapter Seven: Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
• Chapter Eight: A Moment Lost
• Chapter Nine: Not a Happy Time
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Robert Parris Moses and Leadership in Civil Rights Movement Historiography
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index