Bob Moses, veteran of Southern civil rights movement, is dead at 86
Bob Moses, the civil rights activist best known for his determined struggle in the early 1960s to win the right to vote for African Americans in the Jim Crow South, died at his home in Florida on July 25 at the age of 86. His life and contributions exemplify both the achievements as well as the limitations of the 1960s mass movement for democratic rights, and against racial segregation.
Though Moses’ name was not as well-known as those of Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of that period, he was held in the highest regard within the Southern movement, and especially among the many Mississippians whose lives he touched and changed. He is best known as one of the organizers of Freedom Summer, also known as the Mississippi Summer Project, the 1964 campaign that drew more than 1,000 student volunteers from around the country to the state. They assisted Mississippi activists in working to register as many black voters as possible. At that time, only 6.7 percent of eligible African Americans had been able to overcome the Jim Crow roadblocks aimed at denying them the right to vote.