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

Beacon Press

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 used in thestate of Mississippi. A nearby marker reports that on October 2,1944, the Hopson plantation was the site of the first demonstrationof a reliable mechanical cotton picker. On that day, a crowdof almost three thousand sharecroppers, landowners, and townspeoplegathered to watch eight bright red machines pick a field ofcotton.

    Each machine picked about one thousand pounds in an hour.A good human cotton picker could pick about twenty to thirtypounds an hour. On that first day the machines picked all of thecotton in the field, about sixty-two bales. In dollars and cents, accordingto the remarkably precise calculations of plantation ownerHowell Hopson, the cost of picking by machine was $5.26; thecost of picking by hand was $39.41.

    Afterward, in a memo, Hopson compared the introduction ofthe new harvester to the introduction of the cotton gin more thantwo centuries earlier. But Hopson understated the social implicationsof the machine. By speeding up the processing of raw cotton,the cotton gin had created the demand for cheap labor that wasmet by the enslavement of Africans. Sharecropping continued thefundamental relations of slavery: Black labor, white power. Althoughslavery was abolished, in the decades after the Civil War allof the laws and the police powers of the state were aimed at ensuringthat Black economic life be confined to labor in the cottonfields; that no other arena of opportunity be envisioned. Segregationin this sense of dependency on Black labor was a matter ofeconomic survival for whites in states like Mississippi. With themechanical cotton picker, this was no longer true. And this factwould not only slowly begin to change the economics of Mississippi,but its politics as well. Put simply, Black manual labor becamefar less necessary. The mechanical cotton picker was perhapsthe single most important reason why the White Citizens Councilcould mount a drive to "export" Black people out of the state afterthe 1954 Supreme Court decision with so little objection from thepowerful planters. Economic necessity no longer acted as a constrainton the virulence of white racism.

    The cotton-picking machine was part of a larger technologicaltransformation affecting the entire nation. The year beforecotton was first picked by machine in Mississippi, at the Universityof Pennsylvania the United States Army had contracted someof the school's best engineers to develop an electronic machine forcalculating artillery-firing tables. The result was the ElectronicNumerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the world's firstprogrammable computer. It was a monster of a machine, weighingthirty tons, standing ten feet high and eighty feet wide with overeighteen thousand vacuum tubes and rewirable control panels. Althoughit had far less power than today's typical portable computer,ENIAC ushered in the computer era. And just as automationand the mechanical cotton picker were changing cottonfields and southern agriculture, so, inexorably, would the computerpush us from the assembly line by shifting work away fromindustrially based technology to computer-based technology. Infield and factory, the twentieth century was being uprooted.

    With the joining of science, "high" technology, and commerce,something very different from the smokestack industriesthat arose in the last century began to dominate production andthe economy. Among the offspring of the new technology werefiber optics, computers and electronics, polymers, "research anddevelopment," and a range of information technologies. Almostanyone driving a car today is driving a wheeled computer. Detroitautomakers now spend more money putting onboard computersand microprocessors in cars than they spend on steel. In industrialzones like the Chicago area, steel plants and slaughterhouses closedor began moving away around the same time the mechanizedSouth began pushing people out. The industrial corridor of greatfactory cities lying between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic thatonce powered the economy acquired a new name: the rust belt.

    And as the need for assembly line workers diminished, theneed for what economists have begun to call the "knowledgeworker" grew. Such workers have technical skills related to computersand automated machinery, and interpersonal skills such asthe ability to communicate effectively and work as part of a team.The need for such workers continues to grow along with theirsalaries. The American Electronics Association (AEA) defineshigh-tech workers as those working in computers, consumerelectronics, communications equipment, electronic components,semiconductors, industrial electronics, photonics, software services,data processing, and defense electronics. This industry paida total of $280 billion in wages between 1997 and 1999 accordingto the AEA. During that same period the group says, high-techworkers earned 82 percent more than people in other industriesearned.

    Sixty percent of new jobs will require skills possessed by only22 percent of the young people entering the job market now.These jobs require use of a computer and pay about 15 percentmore than jobs that do not. And those jobs that do not are dwindling.Right now, the Department of Labor says, 70 percent of alljobs require technology literacy; by the year 2010 all jobs will requiresignificant technical skills. And if that seems unimaginable,consider this: the Department of Labor says that 80 percent ofthose future jobs do not yet exist. The demand for high-tech workersis now, however. "If there is a dark cloud," former AEA chairmanEd Bersoff told a reporter, "it's that if the trend continues [andthe tech industry keeps growing], we better find more workers."Next year, 1.3 million available high-tech jobs are expected to gounfilled and the demand for workers with high-tech skills is expectedto double by 2006.

    These trends impose new requirements on education andhighlight an old problem. "The most important factor affectingthe long-term production of scientists is the tragic inadequacy ofour primary and secondary science and mathematics educationprogram," National Science Foundation chairman James J. Duderstadttold the Washington Post. The traditional function of matheducation was to identify bright young potential mathematiciansand steer them into math programs based on university campuses.The process was almost self-selecting. Before you could get toanything interesting you had to absorb a lot of abstract math, unlike,say, social studies or even English, which in the hands of creativeteachers could be presented effectively and interestinglythrough literature, stories, and events. These subjects didn't haveto be boring; math was expected to be.

    And in the culture itself?our culture?illiteracy in math isacceptable the way illiteracy in reading and writing is unacceptable.Failure is tolerated in math but not in English. Your parentmay well lean over your shoulder as you struggle with the termpaper your English class requires, or the book report that is due,making sure that you write it, checking the spelling and the grammar.But if you're struggling with an equation while doing youralgebra homework, more likely your parent will look over yourshoulder, wrinkle a brow in puzzlement, then say something like"I never got that stuff either; do the best you can and try not tofail." This is an old problem. In effect, math instruction weeds outpeople and you wind up with what amounts to a priesthood, mastersof the arcane secrets of math through what appears to be someGod-given talent or magic. Forty percent of students taking freshmancalculus in U.S. universities fail it; but not being "good" inmath does not in any way imply inferiority, rather, it confirms thatyou're just like most everyone else.

    The love-hate relationship Black people have with technologyas well as poor schools concentrated in poor Black communitiescompound the problem. While technological innovation hasdeep roots in the overall history of African people?there's ancientEgypt and devices like the shadoof; there's a whole lineage ofAfrican-American inventors; even the cotton gin, some say, wasfirst sketched on the ground by an African slave?for most of thelast five hundred years Black encounters with technology havebeen destructive, crushing of aspirations. Compasses led Portugueseexplorers to Africa, firearms helped conquer the continent.The Atlantic slave trade was facilitated by innovation in ship design.Human field workers were displaced by machines and movednorth, and their children were displaced by newer high-tech machinery.

    It is of course a gross oversimplification to say that Black oppressionexists because of technology, because the three-mastedcaravel, the cotton gin, or the cotton picker or the computer wasinvented. Or that high-tech sneakers advertised by basketballplayers are the cause of juvenile delinquency. Coming to gripswith technology is a need; that Black people have not done so forthe most part is a problem. In inner cities or the rural South there'sno tinkering in the garage, with the ambition of designing somethingbetter than Microsoft Windows. There's no equivalent incomputer programming to the determined practice seen everyday on basketball courts or the daily honing of rap style by groupsof teenagers. Countless young Blacks envision becoming the nextMichael Jordan, or Whitney Houston, or Master P. Few aim at beingthe next Steve Jobs, or another George Washington Carver,for that matter. Blacks make up perhaps 15 percent of this country'spopulation, yet in 1995 they earned 1.8 percent of the Ph.D.sin computer science, 2.1 percent of those in engineering, 1.5 percentin the physical sciences, and 0.6 percent in mathematics.

    Recently I heard from a woman who teaches mathematics atthe University of Arkansas at Monticello. She told me that about80 percent of freshman must take remedial math, for which theycannot get college credit. Another person, the head of a center foracademic advising for minority students at the University of Kentuckyat Louisville, told me that close to 90 percent of enteringminority students had to take remedial algebra during their freshmanyear, for which they did not get credit. A faculty member inexperimental physics at Rutgers recently lamented the absence ofminority students in his classes. He said, "They're all across campusin the remedial sections."

    Industrial technology created schools that educated an elite torun society, while the rest were prepared for factory work by performingrepetitive tasks that mimicked factories. New technologydemands a new literacy?higher math skills for everyone,urban and rural. At the warehouse of a large Mississippi Deltashipping service, the area's largest employer, for example, all thedollies have computers on them. The company needs workerswho understand those computers and can tell them what to do tobetter organize the work.

    Math illiteracy is not unique to Blacks the way the denial of theright to vote in Mississippi was. But it affects Blacks and other minoritiesmuch, much more intensely, making them the designatedserfs of the information age just as the people that we worked within the 1960s on the plantations were Mississippi's serfs then.

    There is urgency to this. Consider prisons, these days thefastest-growing public sector industry in this country. The ranksof prisoners grow enough each year to fill New York's Yankee Stadiumto overflowing. A young man born this year has a one intwenty chance of living some part of his life in jail ... unless he isBlack, then his chances jump to one in four. In their paper on "incarceratedchildren" Washington, D.C., attorneys Joseph B. Tulmanand Mary G. Hynes write of young people in prisons: "Inoverwhelming percentages, they are poor children, and they arechildren of color." They cite a relationship between literacy andprison as well as poverty and prison. "Large percentages of childrenin the delinquency system and adults in the criminal systemare severely undereducated, and literacy skills in these populationsare strikingly low."

    So today, as when the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party(MFDP) made its challenge to Mississippi Democrats in AtlanticCity in 1964, the question remains: How do the people at the bottomget into the mix? In the 1960s, in Mississippi, it was the sharecroppers.In our time, across the country, it is Black, Latino, andpoor white students who are trapped at the bottom with prisons astheir plantations.

    Are we going to have a society where only a small group ofpeople are prepared for the future, where there's a huge knowledgegap? How does such a society stabilize itself?

MATHEMATICS AS A TOOL OF LIBERATION

Math literacy and economic access are how we are going to givehope to the young generation. The lesson I draw from the historyand the statistics I have just recounted is that the idea of citizenshipnow requires not only literacy in reading and writing but literacyin math and science. And the way we guarantee this necessary literacyis through education conceived of much more broadly thanwhat goes on in classrooms.

    The new technologies process information at unprecedentedspeed and quantities, filtering into unanticipated nooks and cranniesof society's (indeed, the world's) economic arrangements?thinkof the relative suddenness with which computers have becomepersonal, popular, and cheap?thereby creating demandfor competent workers who understand these new technologicaltools. "Business" is forced to pressure "education" to produce studentswith the requisite understandings and competencies.

    But this technological shift and the attention it brings also createsome crawl space for those concerned about things other thanthe needs of corporations. Within this crawl space the AlgebraProject has staked out the goal of establishing math literacy forfreedom and citizenship.

    And why focus, as we do, on algebra, of all things?

    The computer, of course, is the symbol of the great technologicalshift that has occurred since World War II. Everybody knowsthat there's something going on with computers out there; E-mail,the Internet, memory, bits, and bytes have entered into common usage.In the time between ENIAC and Windows 2000, the computerhas become a cultural force as well as an instrument of work.(The only equivalent to this impact that I can think of is the automobile.)Strictly speaking, "culture" is not visible; what we see arethe ways culture manifests itself. Everybody is willing to acceptthat what is powering these now-indispensable computers is amathematical, symbolic language. So, while the visible manifestationof the technological shift is the computer, the hidden cultureof computers is math.

    That sets the stage; you have something in there that you canorganize around if you're concerned about math literacy.

    Algebra was assigned a certain role, a certain place in the educationsystem. Students learned how to manipulate abstract symbolicrepresentations for underlying mathematical concepts. Nowhere comes history, which brings in a technology that places abstractsymbolic representations front and center. These representationsare the tools to control the technology, and in order to usethis technology to organize work you have to understand thesesymbolic representations and the place that society has assignedfor young people to learn this symbolism?this is algebra. So, nowalgebra becomes an enormous barrier.

    Before, in the old system, it was a barrier in the sense that alongwith foreign languages algebra acted as one of the gates throughwhich you entered college. If you didn't take algebra, you had totake a language and do well in that. Algebra could not stop youfrom going to college?not having it could hinder you but itcouldn't stop you. And it was okay to be in college unable to domath. People boasted like the parent I discussed earlier: "Nevercould do that stuff," they said, on the college campus then.

    But those days are over. It's not so cool or hip to be completelyilliterate in math. The older generation may be able to get awaywith it, but the younger generation coming up now can't?not ifthey're going to function in the society, have economic viability,be in a position to meaningfully participate, and have some say-soin the decision making that affects their lives. They cannot affordto be completely ignorant of these technological tools and languages.

    So algebra, once solely in place as the gatekeeper for highermath and the priesthood who gained access to it, now is the gatekeeperfor citizenship; and people who don't have it are like thepeople who couldn't read and write in the industrial age. But becauseof how access to?the learning of?algebra was organizedin the industrial era, its place in society under the old jurisdiction,it has become not a barrier to college entrance, but a barrier to citizenship.That's the importance of algebra that has emerged withthe new higher technology. It didn't have to be algebra; that's thedecision the mathematical community made over the years. InFrance, geometry is the driving force of the math and technologyeducation. So, there's nothing that says that it has to be algebra.There's nothing that says it has to be geometry. It could be a mixof a number of things?and some people would argue that itshould be. There are educators and people who are driving mathreform who want to make it a mix, but they're dealing with teachersand parents who understand that geometry is one subject, andalgebra is another. They don't understand unified math. So I don'tthink there will be cultural change around that anytime soon. Forthe time being, it's going to be algebra.

ORGANIZING ALGEBRA:THE NEED TO MAKE A DEMAND

The Algebra Project is founded on the idea that the ongoingstruggle for citizenship and equality for minority people is nowlinked to an issue of math and science literacy. This idea determinesstrategies and choices made about the organization, dissemination,and content of the curriculum. It's important to make itclear that even the development of some sterling new curriculum?areal breakthrough?would not make us happy if it didnot deeply and seriously address the issue of access to literacy foreveryone. That is what is driving the project. The Algebra Projectis not about simply transferring a body of knowledge to children.It is about using that knowledge as a tool to a much larger end.

    One of the implications of this position has been that we havenot spent a major portion of our time developing a full curriculumfor any grade level. What we have done is take what we thoughtwas a minimum intervention and try to maximize its effects. Inthat process we began to define what we're calling a "floor"?anacceptable goal or standard for the mathematics component ofmath-science literacy at the middle school level. The floor is this:you have all the middle school students ready to do the collegeprep math sequence when they get to high school.

    There are two things to clarify about this floor. First, it's thefloor, not the ceiling. We're not trying to put constraints or limitson what any group of children might learn. Second, in many waysthe college prep math curriculum is a moving target. It differsfrom place to place, and it's changing. So for each school, there's alocal target. My metaphor is that you're running to get on boardthe bus. The bus is moving, and you can't get on it from a standstillposition. As your speed begins to approach the speed of the bus,you have a chance of hopping on.

    In terms of curriculum, this means that for each middle schoolstudent there is a standard curriculum out there, which is the collegeprep sequence in high school. What you want for AlgebraProject students is this: whatever is out there, they engage it. Intheir school system, whatever is in place as the standard collegeprep curriculum, you want them to engage that. It's important,however, that whatever else is coming in to supplement or replacethat curriculum has to be a bona fide college preparation. It can'tbe something that is put in place to continue a tradition of separatetracks for some students.

    It is not clear that the expression "standard college prep mathcurriculum" means something coherent in terms of mathematicalcontent. It certainly does mean, however, something in terms ofwhat colleges are going to accept as admissions requirements. Itmust mean, at a minimum, that when you finish it you arrive atcollege ready to do college mathematics. That's another floor thatwe have to be concerned about, although our work is largely withmiddle schools. Our aim is to change the situation that currentlyexists, where large percentages of minority students who getthrough a high school and get admitted to a college have to takeremedial math in order to get to the place where they can even getcollege credit mathematics courses.

    Part of the literacy standard, then, the floor for all students,must be this: when you leave middle school, you are ready to engagewith the college preparatory sequence in high school. It's amoving target, but however it's defined, it must then be seen as anotherfloor: when you leave high school, you must be ready to engagecollege curricula in math and science, for full college credit.

    Consider the role of mathematicians here. There is nothing inthe training of mathematicians that prepares them to lead in sucha literacy effort. Yet the literacy effort really cannot succeed unlessit enlists the active participation of some critical mass of the mathematicalcommunity. The question of how we all learn to workacross several arenas is unsolved. Those arenas are large and complicated.They include the curriculum itself, instructional philosophy,schools, school systems, and individual classrooms. Communitiesand their processes of social change must also be centrallyinvolved, and in some broad sense, national and local politics. Reallyworking in all these arenas will require that many peopleadopt a more holistic outlook than they have ever done before.

    Organizing around algebra has the potential to open a doorwaythat's been locked. Math literacy and economic access are theAlgebra Project's foci for giving hope to the young generation.That's a new problem for educators. It's a new problem for thecountry. The traditional role of science and math education hasbeen to train an elite, create a priesthood, find a few bright studentsand bring them into university research. It hasn't been a literacyeffort. We are putting literacy, math literacy, on the table.Instead of weeding all but the best students out of advanced math,schools must commit to everyone gaining this literacy as theyhave committed to everyone having a reading-writing literacy.

    This is a cultural struggle, the creation of a culture of mathematicalliteracy that's going to operate within the black communityas church culture does. And that means that math won't bejust school-based, but available as reading and writing are. Kidsnow routinely assume that someone will be able to explain someword to them, or teach them how to read a sentence if they don'tunderstand it. They also take it as a matter of course that no onecan help them with their "higher" math studies. Projecting severalgenerations down the road we can see a youngster who hasgrown up in a black neighborhood being able to get his or herquestions about mathematics as easily answered in the neighborhood.

    It is a little bit like guerrilla warfare. You're striking. You'repulling back. You're looking at where you are. You're strikingagain. You're looking for an opening. You're looking for a softspot, trying to find out where you can penetrate. And you areworking with and against various structures. You're in them, butyou're working against them at various levels.

    In several Algebra Project sites students have formed theYoung People's Project (YPP). The beauty of the YPP is that itsmembers are in the schools, but organizationally it is not part ofthe school system. YPP members have carved out their own crawlspace in the schools that allows them to operate and get some presence,some visibility there, some legitimacy. That's a big step foryoung people, to get a piece of turf in school. They're not going tobe easy to dislodge.

    Many people will see our vision as impossible. There's a sensein which most people are not going to believe or accept any of thisagenda until they are confronted with the products of such aneffort: students who come out of classrooms armed with a newunderstanding of mathematics and with a new understanding ofthemselves as leaders, participants, and learners. As I said before, inthe sixties everyone said sharecroppers were apathetic until we gotthem demanding to vote. That finally got attention. Here, wherekids are falling wholesale through the cracks?or chasms?droppingout of sight, becoming fodder for jails, people say they do notwant to learn. The only ones who can dispel that notion are thekids themselves. They, like Mrs. Hamer, Mrs. Devine, E.W. Steptoe,and others who changed the political face of Mississippi in the1960s, have to demand what everyone says they don't want.

DRAWING ON THE PAST:THE ROOTS OF OUR MOVEMENT

The Algebra Project is first and foremost an organizing project?acommunity organizing project?rather than a traditional programof school reform. It draws its inspiration and its methodsfrom the organizing tradition of the civil rights movement. Likethe civil rights movement, the Algebra Project is a process, not anevent.

    Two key aspects of the Mississippi organizing tradition underliethe Algebra Project: the centrality of families to the work oforganizing, and organizing in the context of the community inwhich one lives and works. As civil rights workers in Mississippi,we were absorbed into families as we moved from place to placewith scarcely a dollar in our pockets, and this credential?beingone of the community's children?negated the white powerstructure's efforts to label us "outside agitators." In this way wewere able to sink deep roots into the community, enlarging andstrengthening connections in and among different communities,absorbing into our consciousness the community's memories of"where we have been," forcing us to our own understanding ofour collective experience.

    We are struggling to frame some important questions: Is therea way to talk with young people today as Amzie Moore and EllaBaker did with us in the 1960s? Is there a consensus for youngBlacks, Latinos, and poor whites to tap into that will drive such aliteracy effort? What price must they pay to wage such a struggle?

    Like Ella Baker, we believe in these young people, that theyhave the energy, the courage, the hope to devise means to changetheir condition. Although much concern about the education ofAfrican-American young people is voiced today, I am frequentlyasked why I have turned to teaching school and developing curriculum?teachingmiddle school and high school no less. Thereis a hint of criticism in the question, the suggestion that I am wastingmy time, have abandoned efforts at attempting real, meaningfulsocial change. After all, in the end, such work "merely" leadsto youngsters finding a comfortable place in the system with agood job. Nothing "radical" about that, I am told. This is a failureto understand what actually is "radical," so it might be useful to repeatwhat Ella Baker posits as necessary to the struggle of poor andoppressed people: "It means facing a system that does not lend itselfto your needs and devising means by which you change thatsystem."

    The key word here is you. Our efforts with our target populationis what defines the radical nature of the Algebra Project, notprogram specifics. To make myself very, very clear, even the developmentof some sterling new curriculum?a real breakthrough?wouldnot make us happy if it did not deeply and seriously empowerthe target population to demand access to literacy foreveryone. That is what is driving the project. What is radicalabout the Algebra Project is the students we are trying to reach andthe people we work with to drive a broad math literacy effort?theBlack and poor students and the communities in which theylive, the usually excluded. Ella's words finally mean, whether forvoting rights or economic access, "You who are poor and oppressed:your need, you must make change. You must fashion astruggle." Young people finding their voice instead of being spokenfor is a crucial part of the process. Then and now those designatedas serfs are expected to remain paralyzed, unable to take anaction and unable to voice a demand?their lives dependent onthe goodwill and good works of others. We believe the kind ofsystemic change necessary to prepare our young people for the demandsof the twenty-first century requires young people to takethe lead in changing it.

    These are radical ideas the way that forty years ago constructingthe MFDP so that sharecroppers and day workers couldhave a voice was radical. What made it radical was the work, theeffort, at encouraging this group to empower itself. This was EllaBaker's great lesson, and still a touchstone for us today: that the targetpopulation should also make a demand instead of just havingtheir needs advocated by well-intentioned "radical" reformers.You might say that it radicalizes radicalism. That's what welearned in Mississippi, that it is getting people at the bottom tomake demands, on themselves first, then on the system, that leadsto some of the most important changes. They have to find theirvoices. No matter how great Martin Luther King, Jr., was he couldnot go and challenge the seating of the Mississippi Democrats atAtlantic City. He could advocate for them and support them, buthe could not lead the challenge. The only people who could dothat were the people from Mississippi. And people will not organizethat kind of seminal effort around somebody else's agenda. It'sgot to be internalized?this is our agenda.

    There had been advocates for civil rights long before SNCCand CORE field secretaries arrived in Mississippi. Indeed, the1954 Supreme Court decision was one important victory won bycivil rights advocates. And perhaps because it was primarily wonby advocates, it proceeded "with all deliberate speed." No one disputesthe importance of such victories, but, nonetheless, it waswhen sharecroppers, day laborers, and domestic workers foundtheir voice, stood up, and demanded change, that the Mississippipolitical game was really over. When these folk, people for whomothers traditionally had spoken and advocated, stood up and said,"We demand the right to vote!" refuting by their voices and actionsthe idea that they were uninterested in doing so, they couldnot be refused, and the century-long game of oppression throughdenial of the political franchise ended.

    So to understand the Algebra Project you must begin with theidea of our targeted young people finding their voice as sharecroppersand day laborers, maids, farmers, and workers of all sortsfound theirs in the 1960s. Of course there are differences betweenthe 1960s and what the AP is doing now. For one, the time spanbetween the start of the sit-in movement and the challenge bythe MFDP in Atlantic City was incredibly brief, sandwiched betweentwo presidential elections (Kennedy-Nixon and Johnson-Goldwater).When I look back it feels like twenty years foldedinto four; I still can hardly believe how short a time period thatwas. Math literacy, however, will require a longer time frame.There is a steep learning curve and what we're looking at with theAP is something evolving over generations as math literacy workers/organizersacquire the skills and training through study andpractice and begin tackling the system. Young people, however,may speed this up as youth clearly did in the civil rights movement.And, whereas the right to vote campaign took place in theDeep South, the math literacy problem is throughout the entirenation.

    Yet to understand the Algebra Project, you need to understandthe spirit and the crucial lessons of the organizing tradition of thecivil rights movement. In Mississippi, the voiceless found theirvoice, and once raised, it could not be ignored. Organizers learnedto locate the vast resources in communities that seemed impoverishedand paralyzed at first glance. The lessons of the movement inMississippi are exactly the lessons we need to learn and put intopractice in order to transform the education of our children andtheir prospects for the future. As with voting rights four decadesago, we have to flesh out a consensus on math literacy. Without it,moving the country into systemic change around math educationbecomes almost impossible. You cannot move this country unlessyou have consensus. The country's too big, too huge, too diverse,too confused. That's part of what we learned in Mississippi. Welearned it on the ground, running.

    In this book I present other people's voices as well as my own.Voices from the movement: Ella Baker's, for one. Voices of my colleagues:Dave Dennis's, especially. And voices of kids: the youngpeople's of the Algebra Project. Part of what happened in Mississippiwas the creation of a culture of change?a change in the climateof the consciousness of Black people in that state. It is theestablishing of this climate and change of consciousness aboutmathematics in the larger community that will go a long way towardmaking it possible to change the classrooms?really changethe classrooms; for we are talking about systemic change and as acountry we don't yet know how to do systemic change. We can'tpoint to any school system where we have put through systemicchange around math education.

    This is a very personal book. The stories and lessons I recountfrom Mississippi are stories and lessons of transformation in thewhite heat of struggle for change. The story I tell about how theAlgebra Project started continues that story of struggle and transformation,in my family and my community. We see in this bookthe new needs of the twenty-first century, and that meeting thesenew needs will take us into new territory the way that need forvoter registration took us into rural Mississippi. There's even apolitics: Who's going to gain access to the new technology? Who'sgoing to control it? What do we have to demand of the educationalsystem to prepare for the new technological era? What opportunitieswill be available for our children? These are questionsthat ultimately challenge power as the civil rights movement did,for that earlier movement was about more than lunch countersand ballots.

Continues...

Excerpted from Radical Equationsby Robert P. Moses Copyright © 2002 by Robert P. Moses. Excerpted by permission.
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