Hello and welcome to More or less with me, Charm Encosia,

with a program that looks at the sometimes unexpected ways that numbers and calculations shape our world.

Today we're remembering the mass teacher from New York who made a profound impact on American civil rights and education,

Dr Robert Moses, who died in late July.

More widely known as Bob Moses, his personality, unlike his achievements, was famously low-key.

Born in Harlem in the 1930s, Bob Moses was raised in a public housing project.

Every week his parents, a janitor and a homemaker, would bring him library books.

Their encouragement paid off.

He excelled at school and college, earned a master's degree in philosophy from Harvard,

and taught mathematics at a renowned private school in New York.

By then he was also involved in the local civil rights scene,

but it was something he saw on TV that elevated his activism.

In restaurants across the south of the country, Black students were holding peaceful protests

by sitting at segregated lunch counters which were legally reserved for white people only.

Margaret Burnham is university distinguished professor of law at Northeastern University.

Back then as a student non-violent coordinator,

she first worked with a man who would become a lifelong friend.

It was a pivotal time for the movement.

Bob moved to Mississippi in 1961.

Mississippi had there to for bin an essentially closed state.

The horrors that took place there that deeply affected the lives of African-American communities

were not really filtering out to the rest of the world.

...