ASU Hosts Speaker in Celebration of MLK

Dr. Ed Crowther
The Paw Print

Founder of the Algebra Project and nationally recognized civil rights activist Robert Parris Moses believes all students have the constitutional right to quality education. Adams State University brings Moses to campus in celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Week.
Moses will present two free lectures on Thursday, Jan. 23: “Quality Public School Education as a Constitutional Right,” at noon in Porter Hall room 130 and “From Mississippi to the Algebra Project: The Evolution of Constitutional Personhood in America” at 7 p.m. in Carson Auditorium.
Both events are free and open to the public. Moses visit to campus is a collaborative effort between the Mathematics Program, Dr. Ed Crowther and the History, Anthropology, Philosophy, Political Science, and Spanish Department; Title V Institutional Grant, Title V STEM Grant, and CIELO. Moses received his BA from Hamilton College and his MA in Philosophy from Harvard University. He was a prominent figure in the Civil Rights Movement as a field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
In 1961, Moses initiated SNCC’s Mississippi Voter Registration Project, and was appointed its director in 1962. He helped to lead the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) into the Mississippi Summer Project (1964 Freedom Summer), which parachuted the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to the National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City.
He received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1982-87), and subsequently started the Algebra Project (AP), which uses mathematics as an organizing tool for a Quality Education as a Constitutional Right (QECR) for all students.
With support of the National Science Foundation (NSF) since 2002, the AP has been working with cohorts of high school students who previously performed in the lowest quartile on standardized exams.
This work has led AP to propose a math high school “benchmark” for bottom quartile students: that they graduate high school on time, in four years, ready to do college math for college credit. To this end AP is exploring collaborations around a concept of “Math Cohort High Schools.” Moses is co-author of Radical Equations—Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project (Beacon, 2001) and co-editor of Quality Education as a Constitutional Right-creating a grassroots movement to transform public schools (Beacon Press, 2010).
In 2011-2012, Moses was the Distinguished Visitor for the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University, and was a visiting lecturer at NYU School of Law during the fall semester, 2012, and is President of the Algebra Project, Inc. For more information about the Algebra Project visit www.aglebra.org.