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Bob Moses teaching math to students at Lanier High School
MFP Voices

The Algebra Project: Bob Moses’ ‘Gateway to Equality’ for Black Students

As an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the 1960s, Bob Moses traveled to the most dangerous parts of Mississippi to help African Americans end segregation and secure the right to vote. But it would be tutoring students in math 20 years later at his daughter’s racially mixed middle school in Massachusetts that would lead to his life’s work—The Algebra Project.

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News

‘Blackest Bus in America’: New Generation of Freedom Riders Start Journey in Jackson, Miss.

Sixty years after the original Freedom Riders rolled into Jackson, Miss., after a treacherous bus journey down from Washington, D.C., a new generation of activists chose to start a new ride for equal rights and freedom at Tougaloo College on June 19, 2021, which was the first time in American history that Juneteenth had been celebrated as a federal holiday.

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Culture

‘An Agenda to Bring Light’: Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign Wants ‘Third Reconstruction’

The Poor People’s Campaign’s “Third Reconstruction” resolution highlights what it calls a congressional failure to elevate the poor through social programs, voting-rights expansion and the elimination of systemic racism. It details suggested solutions for each of these problems, including an increase in the long-stagnant federal minimum wage, provisions to expand insurance coverage, a large-scale reduction of student debt and prison reform.

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James and Judy Meredith at statue dedication
MFP Voices

My Husband James Meredith Was Gunned Down for Defying Racism But Keeps Stepping

It’s like it happened yesterday. Fifty-five years ago, I was watching the news in my parents’ home in Gary, Ind., when I saw the news that James Meredith had been shot. I couldn’t know then that some day I’d be married to the man gunned down in the middle of a Mississippi road for demanding equality for Black Americans.

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1935 US Sterilization Map
MFP Voices

The Troubling Past of Forced Sterilization of Black Women and Girls in Mississippi and the South

Much like the North Carolina legislators, those in Mississippi based their arguments on claims about who is fit to have children, specifically those on government assistance. Rep. Walter Meek of Eupora, Miss., said that “the State of Mississippi is subsidizing illegitimacy through welfare payments, and that the moral structure has completely broken down in some segments of society.” 

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Biloxi wade-in, 1963
MFP Voices

The Vestiges of Jim Crow and the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission

The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a state-funded spy agency charged with resisting integration and civil-rights activity, actively surveilled these civil rights activists and allowed law enforcement agencies to openly violate their constitutional rights in Jim Crow Mississippi. Those were dangerous times that still affect my family today. 

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