DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. We're going to remember one of the pioneers of the civil rights movement, Bob Moses. He died Sunday at the age of 86. The quiet-spoken, self-effacing activist helped lead the effort in Mississippi to organize and register rural Black residents to vote. In 1960, after watching news footage of lunch counter sit-ins in the South, he left his job teaching math in New York City to help in the civil rights movement.
When he arrived in Mississippi, he was one of only a few activists there. He joined the staff of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And in 1964, he helped organize Freedom Summer, which recruited college students - mostly white students from the North - to come down to Mississippi to help in the effort to register African Americans to vote and to bring the country's attention to Mississippi's entrenched white supremacy. Here he is at a news conference announcing the program.