Moses Robert Parris - Robert Parris Moses: a life in civil rights and leadership at the grassroots

Writing a life history is always a difficult enterprise. Not only does someones life and meaning have to be reduced to a few hundred pages, but they also have to be placed within a larger frame of history, even if focusing on an individual actor within a broad movement underscores how history often developed without the grand designs historians read into it post facto; Mosess entrance into Mississippi testifies to this. I have therefore built my story predominantly around archived material produced during the movements heyday, that is, the late 1950s to mid-1960s, such as correspondence, project files, reports, and minutes from Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) workers, federal and local officials, and workers from other organizations, like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. To provide a sense of how outsiders witnessed movement activism, I have included contemporary press reports, although fully aware that what is depicted and how is influenced by their authors subjectivity and civil rights groups interference.

As a method of testing my own views, filling gaps in my knowledge, and bringing more flavor to the events and people described, I have relied heavily on oral history, memoirs, and other ego documents by movement veterans and conducted in-person and email interviews myself. But wary of the fact that oral history is liable to factual errors, memory lapses, and shifts in interpretations due to the benefit of hindsight, I have generally accorded greater weight to interviews recorded at the time. Veterans present-day circumstances, like prominent positions in mainstream American life, might influence what they remember or choose to reveal. Likewise, it is logical to assume that where Moses is today determines his interpretations of how he got there.

Yet oral history proved a valuable addition because Moses has kept his personal records private. Much knowledge pertaining to his background and evaluations of movement events are captured primarily in the rare interviews he granted to historians such as Clayborne Carson, Taylor Branch, William Chafe, and Charles Payne in the 1980s and 1990s. But he has mostly resisted invitations to participate in the telling of his story. Reflecting the difficulties attached to history writing as well as his singular fascination with truth telling and (moral) purity in language, he has explained this reluctance through his realization that historians and the other activists, educators, and academicians have to tell a story, the story has to have characters, and in some sense there has to be steady states which run into trouble and get resolved. He attributed this resentment for the crafting of stories to the 1960s, when romanticized northern and biased southern newspaper accounts of the movement provided him with my first insights into the difficult question of getting the story straight as I tried to understand the various stories reporters crafted about movement events in which I played a part and/or was even a central character. As such, all historical evidence, he believed, comes with background information so there are virtually no observation sentences whose truth or falsity are evident without appeal to some background information and/or some theory. Even in the heyday of his life, he still had great difficulty reading about himself, a fact that cannot be understood without background either, even if that background is his own subjective interpretation.

But Moses was fully aware of the fact that his words, always carefully chosen, influence interpretations of history, too. From its inception, SNCC was overly conscious of how the movement was depicted; part of its, and especially Mosess, emphasis on grassroots leadership was rooted in this. In the 1960s, he even deliberately reached out to sympathetic media outlets to make sure their reports reflected the message he wanted to convey and, consciously or subconsciously, adjusted his speech and behavior in public accordingly. SNCC still has an active veteran community that plays a dominant role in shaping history and conceptualizing the movement through conferences, memoirs/books, and talks at schools and other venues. Interpretations of pivotal incidents in SNCCs history, like the events in Albany or Atlantic City, have been repeated over and over, even by workers who were not present as they became part of a collective SNCC identity. Moreover, SNCC workers have come to use historical works to legitimize their own interpretations and memories by reacting to and, more often, against what historians have written. Consequently, their stories exist in part due to, and are both formed and limited by, what others have said about the movement.

Since this might precipitate changes in interpretation over time, their words should be analyzed with caution. This extends to Moses, especially because no trail exists of his thoughts between his departure from the movement in 1965 and his return from Africa almost fifteen years later. This, for instance, allowed for a fairly consistent trajectory of his organizing views in his