Bob Moses, a prominent civil rights activist and mathematics instructor, died at 86 on Sunday.
Moses died inside his home in Hollywood, Florida, his daughter announced, according to multiple outlets. A cause of death was not specified.
The activist was a math instructor in the 1960s at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx, New York, before he traveled to Mississippi to help the impoverished black community register to vote. The 86-year-old was credited for helping thousands cast their ballot while he operated freedom schools designed to educate illiterate people of color.
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Moses, a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Council of Federated Organizations, co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. His legacy is remembered in the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and through a mural on the COFO building at Jackson State University.
In the 1960s, Moses was struck with a knife handle by a protester during a voter registration event and was lauded for continuing his march to a local courthouse, despite a large gash on his head. In another incident, three members of the Klu Klux Klan opened fire at a car he was a passenger in, nearly striking him.
The civil rights activist, who authored Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project, grew up in a Harlem housing project before playing basketball and majoring in psychology at Hamilton College. He later went on to earn his master’s in philosophy at Harvard University in 1957.
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His death drew remarks from Jackson State University President Thomas Hudson.
“I extend my deepest prayers and condolences to the family of Robert ‘Bob’ Parris Moses, civil rights icon and influencer,” he wrote in a tweet. “He relentlessly fought for Black Mississippians, as a leader of SNCC and as the visionary behind the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project.”
