The leader of the Emmett Till generation | Opinion

Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy who was viciously beaten and then lynched in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman, would have been 85 this week, on July 25. Coincidentally, Till’s birthday is also the fifth anniversary since Bob Moses, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi during the 1960s, passed away.

Many of the young, Black SNCC organizers from Mississippi who worked for Moses were about the same age as Till and were part of what became known as the Emmett Till generation. They joined SNCC because they feared that what happened to Till could happen to them.

While Till remains a cause célèbre, with three books about his horrific death since 2023, Moses has slipped undeservedly into obscurity. His lack of recognition today is hard to understand because his strategy of bringing white students south to help Blacks register to vote in 1964—what became known as Freedom Summer—broke the back of Mississippi’s resistance to civil rights. He not only directed Freedom Summer, but helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the seating of Mississippi’s segregated delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Moses then had a second career as a civil rights activist in the 1990s when he founded the Algebra Project, which prepares mostly low-income Black children for college-level math. Math proficiency, according to Moses, would enable Blacks to participate fully in society, deepening the meaning of the citizenship they first achieved with the vote. Blacks with math skills could not only sit at lunch counters but could afford to eat there.

Activists today would do well to model themselves on Moses. He led by example. He didn’t ask anyone to take risks, which might lead to them being beaten, arrested, or jailed, that he didn’t take himself. He recoiled at adulation, resisted the allure of power, and lived modestly. Moses displayed a solidity and an inner poise that others found reassuring. Consequently, Black sharecroppers had confidence in him, local NAACP leaders trusted him, Black SNCC organizers wanted to be him, and white Freedom Summer volunteers revered him.

Moses also deserves emulation because, as an organizer, he took an existing consensus—Blacks should be able to vote, all students should receive a quality education—and developed strategies that activated people to realize those demands. Moses didn’t engage in pedantic debates but thought strategically on how to alter an unfavorable balance of power. For example, SNCC was stymied by Mississippi’s state-sanctioned racial terror. Moses brilliantly anticipated that Freedom Summer would activate Mississippi’s violent reflexes and thereby elicit federal protection to check them.

Similarly, when white county governments in Mississippi tried to starve the movement out by refusing to distribute free food that the federal government supplied, Moses proposed that SNCC create an alternative welfare system to alleviate the distress of hungry Black families. He not only enlisted churches and colleges throughout the country to send food, recruiting groups who previously had been on the sidelines, but his strategy changed the way local people in Mississippi perceived SNCC organizers. Previously, local Blacks in Mississippi viewed SNCC workers suspiciously as agitators who precipitated white repression. Now local people regarded them as benefactors who provided vital resources.

Moses also developed the concept of the earned insurgency. He believed that subordinate, weaker groups had to act with courage and discipline, which induces more powerful actors to intervene and take risks on their behalf.

“Black people were not going to be able by themselves to move this country to change,” Moses explained, so they “had to earn the right to call on the rest of the country.”

For example, when Blacks showed courage in the face of repression, it inspired white Freedom Summer volunteers to emulate them. Similarly, Moses appreciated that the Department of Justice (DOJ) frequently petitioned courts on behalf of SNCC because it had earned “the right to be people that they [the DOJ] would go to bat for.” SNCC succeeded in Mississippi because it acted in ways that earned the support of powerful outsiders who intervened on its behalf.

Due to Moses’s leadership, the heroism of SNCC organizers, and the courage of countless local people, Mississippi is very different today from the one that stole Emmett Till’s future. Blacks in Mississippi no longer must endure the humiliation of segregation and the denial of their constitutional rights. The achievements of the Emmett Till generation that Moses led were remarkable, but the journey is far from complete. As activists consider the next destination, it is important to think strategically, as Moses did, about how to get there: how to mobilize social forces that are powerful enough to succeed; how to generate leverage that can realize policy goals; and how to act with discipline and perseverance to create an earned insurgency.

Moses offered a way out of Egypt. Now others must adopt his legacy of thinking strategically to reach the Promised Land.

Alan Draper is Emeritus Professor of Government at St. Lawrence University.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.