In 1960, 25-year-old Bob Moses, who died over the weekend at the age of 86, arrived at the Cleveland, Mississippi, home of a World War II veteran named Amzie Moore. Moses was coming from the Atlanta offices of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). A New York City teacher, he had first traveled south to join the civil-rights movement after being inspired by the sit-ins earlier that year. But the work at SCLC was slow and tedious. It was a top-down organization, dominated by the towering figure of King and his dizzying schedule of events and initiatives. Office duties were not what Bob Moses had in mind.
Ella Baker, a veteran NAACP organizer who helped create the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) after the sit-ins, was working with Moses that summer. She understood his restlessness—which I also came to understand decades later, when I interviewed him for a book I was writing—and offered him a way to engage more directly with people instead of paper. Baker gave Moses a list of names of longtime NAACP organizers scattered across the Deep South, where the movement was less prevalent and more dangerous. In a time when belonging to the NAACP could get you evicted, fired, or even killed, the activists on that list held on to their membership.
Moses visited the people on Baker’s list. He went to Deep South cities like Talladega and Birmingham, Alabama; New Orleans and Shreveport, Louisiana; and Clarksdale, Mississippi. His most important visit of the journey was with Amzie Moore, who had also been inspired by the sit-ins and was looking for a way of “capturing this sit-in energy,” Moses remembered nearly 50 years later. The grizzled activist vetted the younger organizer, testing his mettle in front of Black Mississippians who had lived their entire life under Jim Crow and fully knew its dangers. “He put me up in front of a church,” Moses told me. “Amzie wanted to see how I related to people and presented myself and the movement.” The following year, Moses did something that a national leader like King never could have done—he brought that movement into Mississippi and in turn helped deliver Mississippi into America.
Black Mississippians had long been fighting for civil rights, but this phase of their struggle was different. Led by Moses, SNCC was determined to crack open the state that one professor had dubbed “the closed society” for its repressive government, which haunted Black people and even employed a statewide investigative unit to preserve Jim Crow. SNCC’s strategy differed from that of other civil-rights organizations in that the group wanted to develop a grassroots approach that would empower everyday Black people to directly challenge Jim Crow. This version of the movement, grounded in personal example and moral suasion, is lesser known to many people than the bridge in Selma, Alabama, or the March on Washington. But in many ways, it was much more powerful than any single event or speech.