Ben Moynihan & Bill Crombie on Algebra Project, Bob Moses, & Civil Rights

In this week’s episode of The Learning Curve, co-hosts U-Arkansas Prof. Albert Cheng and Alisha Searcy interview Benjamin Moynihan, Executive Director, and, William Crombie, Director of Professional Development, for the Algebra Project, Inc. Mr. Moynihan and Mr. Crombie reflect on the life and legacy of Civil Rights era icon, and math educator, Bob Moses. They trace Moses’s journey from a Harlem upbringing and elite liberal arts education to his transformative grassroots activism in 1960s Mississippi, organizing Black voter registration and co-directing the Freedom Summer Project 1964. They discuss his collaboration with Mississippi sharecropper and Civil Rights era legend Fannie Lou Hamer, and his principled departure from the U.S. to raise a family and teach math in Tanzania, where his educational vision deepened. Bob Moses later founded the Algebra Project to confront math illiteracy as a modern civil rights issue, empowering students of color through community-based Algebra instruction. Moynihan and Crombie explore the Algebra Project’s enduring mission; its pioneering role advocating for Algebra I as the gateway course to all higher-level math; and the importance of local buy-in for K-12 education reform. They reflect on Bob Moses’s profound, often quiet leadership; Pulitzer-winning Civil Rights Movement historian Taylor Branch's high praise of his courageous voter registration work in Jim Crow Mississippi; and how the Algebra Project's grassroots model of organizing promotes access to high-level math instruction for all American schoolchildren.