Robert Moses
Founder and President, "The Algebra Project"

Robert Moses is a Civil Rights activist, math educator and creator of the highly acclaimed Algebra Project. Per Moses, "Math literacy is the key to 21st Century citizenship."

In the 1960s, Moses was the director of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee's Mississippi Project. He was also recognized as a driving force behind the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964 and in organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party through his work for the Council of Federated Organizations.

From 1969-1976, Moses worked for the Ministry of Education in Tanzania, East Africa, where he was a teacher and chairperson of the math department at the Samé school. After returning to the States, Moses used a MacArthur Foundation fellowship to teach in the Open Program of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Elementary School in Cambridge, MA. During that period, Moses developed the concept for the Algebra Project and began to carry it out together with concerned parents, teachers, educators and activists.

The Algebra Project focuses on helping middle school students make the conceptual shift from arithmetic to algebra and be prepared for algebra in the eighth grade, and thus a college preparatory math sequence in high school. Three decades later after the concept became a reality, the Algebra Project reaches approximately 9,000 students per year. One study of Algebra Project graduates in Cambridge, MA found 92 percent of graduates went on to upper-level mathematics courses in ninth grade, twice the rate of students not in the project.

Moses was born and raised in Harlem, NY, and received his B.A. from Hamilton College in 1956. In 1957, he received a Masters Degree in Philosophy from Harvard University and taught middle school mathematics at the Horace Mann School in New York City from 1958–1961. Moses resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife, Dr. Janet Moses, pediatrician. They have four children. Moses is an Eminent Scholar at the Center for Urban Education & Innovation at Florida International University in Miami, FL. He is the recipient of several college and university honorary doctorate degrees and honors, including the Heinz Award for the Human Condition, the Nation/Puffin Prize for Creative Citizenship, the Mary Chase Smith Award for American Democracy from the National Association of Secretaries of State, and the James Conant Bryant Award from the Education Commission of the States.