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Changing Mississippi: Part 1 of 4; A cause to die for; The Robert Moses story
In the early summer of 1960, he arrived in Atlanta and went directly to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference offices with a letter of recommendation from Bayard Rustin, one of Martin Luther King's advisors.
He expected to find a job working for the organization but SCLC had only three full time employees and no money to hire him.
He was well built, of medium height with light brown skin. He wore glasses and had freckles across his nose. There was something about him that made most Southerners nervous and uncomfortable.
One of the staff members remembers, "We were at that time rather suspicious of him. We just couldn't figure why a guy from New York would come down here."
They put him to work stuffing envelopes.
Robert Parris Moses at 29 was a few years older than the student volunteers who had gathered in Atlanta to work for the civil rights movement.
"He was so unobtrusive that in his quiet self-possessed stillness he fixed attention on himself," said a co-worker.
One of the student volunteers went about telling anyone who would listen that he "thought Moses must be a Communist because he was from New York, he wore glasses and was smarter than they were."
The thing that set him apart from everyone else was his quiet introspective attitude which gave people the feeling that he was some kind of leader, even though he made no attempt to assume a leadership position. In fact he shunned it. One of the older civil rights leaders described him "quiet, unassuming, a deep thinker and quite ordinary.
He was just like a "common shoe" and seldom expressed himself unless he was asked."
Bob Moses began to discuss with the leadership what he thought was the proper approach to do away with the 'Jim Crow' segregation laws. From his own observation of the political situation, he knew that what black Southerners needed to solve their problems was more than being able to ride in the front of the bus or eat at a lunch counter. Black Americans had to gain political power and the only way to achieve this was through the ballot...