The Algebra Project and Democratic Politics

I first read about the Algebra Project in February 1993, in a New York Times Magazine article profiling Bob Moses, the legendary former field director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who in the 1960s had courageously promoted black voter registration and civil rights in Mississippi. Entitled “Mississippi Learning,” the piece celebrated Moses’s current career as a math educator dedicated to enhancing the educational prospects and economic opportunities of poor, mainly African-American children, presenting this career as the true fulfillment of Moses’s prior activity as a democratic activist and civil rights leader.

I found this story heartening, but of little political interest until two years later, when I read Meta Mendel-Reyes’s Reclaiming Democracy: The Sixties in Politics and Memory, and discovered that Reyes too found Moses’s story powerful—as an example of the effacement of historical memory about the true significance of the participatory democracy for which SNCC struggled. Instead of telling this story, Mendel-Reyes wrote, “the Times tells a generic story of a young radical who grew up, setting aside childish politics for a career which promises to imp...