The Quiet Courage of Bob Moses

In 1960, 25-year-old Bob Moses, who died over the weekend at the age of 86, arrived at the Cleveland, Mississippi, home of a World War II veteran named Amzie Moore. Moses was coming from the Atlanta offices of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). A New York City teacher, he had first traveled south to join the civil-rights movement after being inspired by the sit-ins earlier that year. But the work at SCLC was slow and tedious. It was a top-down organization, dominated by the towering figure of King and his dizzying schedule of events and initiatives. Office duties were not what Bob Moses had in mind.

Ella Baker, a veteran NAACP organizer who helped create the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) after the sit-ins, was working with Moses that summer. She understood his restlessness—which I also came to understand decades later, when I interviewed him for