Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project - Softcover

Moses, Robert; Cobb, Charles E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807031275 ISBN 13: 9780807031278

Verlag: Beacon Press, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

The remarkable story of the Algebra Project, a community-based effort to develop math-science literacy in disadvantaged schools—as told by the program’s founder
 
“Bob Moses was a hero of mine. His quiet confidence helped shape the civil rights movement, and he inspired generations of young people looking to make a difference”—Barack Obama

At a time when popular solutions to the educational plight of poor children of color are imposed from the outside—national standards, high-stakes tests, charismatic individual saviors—the acclaimed Algebra Project and its founder, Robert Moses, offer a vision of school reform based in the power of communities. Begun in 1982, the Algebra Project is transforming math education in twenty-five cities. Founded on the belief that math-science literacy is a prerequisite for full citizenship in society, the Project works with entire communities—parents, teachers, and especially students—to create a culture of literacy around algebra, a crucial stepping-stone to college math and opportunity.

Telling the story of this remarkable program, Robert Moses draws on lessons from the 1960s Southern voter registration he famously helped organize: “Everyone said sharecroppers didn't want to vote. It wasn't until we got them demanding to vote that we got attention. Today, when kids are falling wholesale through the cracks, people say they don't want to learn. We have to get the kids themselves to demand what everyone says they don't want.”

We see the Algebra Project organizing community by community. Older kids serve as coaches for younger students and build a self-sustained tradition of leadership. Teachers use innovative techniques. And we see the remarkable success stories of schools like the predominately poor Hart School in Bessemer, Alabama, which outscored the city's middle-class flagship school in just three years.

Radical Equations provides a model for anyone looking for a community-based solution to the problems of our disadvantaged schools.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Moses is an American teacher and civil rights activist. He is best known as the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's Mississippi Voter Registration Project, the co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and the founder of the Algebra Project. Moses has been the recipient of several awards, including a MacArthur fellowship and a Heinz Award in the Human Condition. 

Co-author Charles E. Cobb, Jr. has thirty years of experience as a journalist for major magazines and is currently senior writer at allAfrica.com.

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Radical Equations

Bring the Lessons of the Civil Rights Movement to America's SchoolsBy Robert P. Moses

Beacon Press

Copyright © 2002 Robert P. Moses
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780807031278

Chapter One

Algebra and Civil Rights?

In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning?getting down to and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system. That is easier said than done. But one of the things that has to be faced is, in the process of wanting to change that system, how much have we got to do to find out who we are, where we have come from and where we are going.... I am saying as you must say, too, that in order to see where we are going, we not only must remember where we have been, but we must understand where we have been.
? Ella Baker

The sit-ins woke me up.

    Until then, my Black life was conflicted. I was a twenty-six-year-oldteacher at Horace Mann, an elite private school in theBronx, moving back and forth between the sharply contrastingworlds of Hamilton College, Harvard University, Horace Mann,and Harlem.

    The sit-ins hit me powerfully, in the soul as well as the brain. Iwas mesmerized by the pictures I saw almost every day on thefront pages of the New York Times?young committed Black facesseated at lunch counters or picketing, directly and with great dignity,challenging white supremacy in the South. They looked likeI felt.

    It was the sit-in movement that led me to Mississippi for thefirst time in 1960. And that trip changed my life. I returned to thestate a year later and over the next four years, was transformed as Itook part in the voter registration movement there. The greatcampaigns of protest so identified with Dr. Martin Luther King,Jr., were swirling around us, inspiring immense crowds in vastpublic spaces. But along with students from the sit-in movement,in Mississippi I became immersed in and committed to the olderbut less well-known tradition of community organizing. In mymind, Ella Baker, who helped to found Dr. King's organization,symbolizes this organizing tradition?quiet work in out-of-the-wayplaces and the commitment of organizers-digging into localcommunities.

    She was our "fundi." In Tanzania, where I lived for a time inthe 1970s, the Swahili word fundi refers to a concept of passing onknowledge through direct contact with people who are fundis?skilledcraftsmen and instructors. Ella Baker, as well as others, wasour fundi in the tradition of community organizing. Borrowingfrom another African tradition, I feel the need to speak the namesof at least some of these important adult Black grassroots leaderswho quietly shaped not only Mississippi's civil rights movement,but the southern civil rights movement as a whole: Amzie Moore,Fannie Lou Hamer, Hartman Turnbow, Irene Johnson, VictoriaGray, Vernon Dahmer, Unita Blackwell, Henry Sias, AyleneQuin, C. O. Chinn, C. C. Bryant, Webb Owens, E.W. Steptoe,Annie Devine, and Hazel Palmer. Their work, which also educatedme and other young people, changed the political terrain ofa state, and of the nation. What they were is who we are now.

    In those days, of course, the issue was the right to vote, and thequestion was political access. Voter registration was by no meansthe only issue one could have fought for, but it was crucial and urgent:Black people had no real control over their political lives,and the time was right to organize a movement to change this.There existed a powerful consensus on the issue of gaining the politicalfranchise, and the drive for voter registration?especiallywhere it took place deep in the Black belt of the South?capturedthe imaginations of Americans, particularly of African Americans.So, for a short period of time, because there was agreementamong all of the people acting to change Mississippi, we were ableto get resources and people from around the country to come andwork with us on a common program to get the vote. There wasconsensus providing a base for strategy and action.

    Today, I want to argue, the most urgent social issue affectingpoor people and people of color is economic access. In today'sworld, economic access and full citizenship depend crucially onmath and science literacy. I believe that the absence of math literacyin urban and rural communities throughout this country is anissue as urgent as the lack of registered Black voters in Mississippiwas in 1961. I believe we can get the same kind of consensus wehad in the 1960s for the effort of repairing this. And I believe thatsolving the problem requires exactly the kind of community organizingthat changed the South in the 1960s. This has beenmy work?and that of the Algebra Project?for the past twentyyears.

    I know how strange it can sound to say that math literacy?andalgebra in particular?is the key to the future of disenfranchisedcommunities, but that's what I think, and believe with allof my heart. Let me tell you how and why.

HOW MATHEMATICS BECAMEA CIVIL RIGHTS BATTLEGROUND

When I first came to Mississippi, most Black people living in therich cotton-growing land of the Delta, where they were a majorityof the population, were living in serfdom on plantations. Theyhad no control over their lives?their political lives, their economiclives, their educational lives. Within industrialized U.S. society,a microcosm of serfdom had been allowed to grow. The civilrights movement used the vote and political access to try to breakthat up.

    We are growing similar serflike communities within our citiestoday. This began to become apparent as the southern civil rightsmovement was gaining some of its most important breakthroughs.In 1965, Los Angeles and other urban areas exploded for a briefsecond and everyone got concerned. Those of us who live in theseneighborhoods today are watching them implode all of the time.The violence and the criminalization make people eat each otherup. Most of what is proposed in response are Band-Aid solutions?buildmore jails, put more police on the street. That isworking at the problem from the back end.

    What is central now is the need for economic access; the politicalprocess has been opened?there are no formal barriers to voting,for example?but economic access, taking advantage of newtechnologies and economic opportunity, demands as much effortas political struggle required in the 1960s.

    A great technological shift has occurred that places the needfor math literacy front and center. Consider two epochal machinesfrom the middle of the twentieth century, and how muchour society has changed since they were introduced.

    The Hopson plantation, a few miles south of Clarksdale onHighway 49, is one of the largest and oldest in Mississippi. In ourwork we passed it often in the 1960s, unaware of its significance.On a piece of the plantation's land, just off the main highway bythe banks of a small creek and a hog farm, there's an old rusted-outmachine, one of the first cotton-picking machines...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Beacon Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0807031275
• ISBN 13: 9780807031278
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar