Robert Parris Moses by Laura Visser-Maessen

For Moses and his associates in Mississippi, broadening the franchise demanded an end to literacy tests, which excluded many black (as well as poor white) citizens. And, as in the rest of the Deep South, the black vote threatened the power of the racist Southern Democrats in Congress who had for decades blocked any legislation promoting equal rights. If they registered en masse, they would have the power to elect many city and county governments, school boards, mayors, and a substantial number of members of the state legislature.

Blacks constituted a majority of the Mississippi Delta population and were a significant demographic statewide. Moses saw that in states like Mississippi, black voting rights were a radical proposition in multiple senses. “We lurch,” says Bob Moses, a key civil rights organizer who helped cement the Voting Rights Act as one of the movement’s landmark victories and whose life is now the subject of an important biography by Laura Visser-Maessen, professor of American literature and culture at Radboud University in the Netherlands. In Mississippi, which was at the center of the civil rights campaign that ultimately led to the act’s passage, some one-third of counties have closed polling places.

Holder, 868 polling places have been closed in Southern states. Since June 2013, when the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. University of North Carolina Press, 2016, 456 pp. Robert Parris Moses: A Life in Civil Rights and Leadership at the Grassroots

Influential civil rights organizer Bob Moses, who helped spearhead the 1964 Freedom Summer, now focuses his efforts on education (Princeton Public Library / Flickr) A new biography of key civil rights organizer Bob Moses-who helped spearhead the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign-offers an insightful portrait of a man and a movement whose lessons could not be more relevant today.

Robert Parris Moses by Laura Visser-Maessen