After all, in the end, such work “merely” leads to youngsters finding a comfortable place in the system with a good job. There is a hint of criticism in the question, the suggestion that I am wasting my time, have abandoned efforts at attempting real, meaningful social change. Although much concern about the education of African-American young people is voiced today, I am frequently asked why I have turned to teaching school and developing curriculum -teaching middle school and high school no less. Like Ella Baker, we believe in these young people, that they have the energy, the courage, and the hope to devise means to change their condition. We are struggling to frame some important questions: Is there a way to talk with young people today as Amzie Moore and Ella Baker did with us in the 1960s? Is there a consensus for young Blacks, Latinos, and poor whites to tap into that will drive such a literacy effort? What price must they pay to wage such a struggle?

As civil rights workers in Mississippi, we were absorbed into families as we moved from place to place with scarcely a dollar in our pockets, and this credential - being one of the community’s children - negated the white power structure’s efforts to label us “outside agitators.” In this way we were able to sink deep roots into the community, enlarging and strengthening connections in and among different communities, absorbing into our consciousness the community’s memories of “where we have been,” forcing us to our own understanding of our collective experience. Two key aspects of the Mississippi organizing tradition underlie the Algebra Project: the centrality of families to the work of organizing, and organizing in the context of the community in which one lives and works. Like the Civil Rights Movement, the Algebra Project is a process, not an event. It draws its inspiration and its methods from the organizing tradition of the Civil Rights Movement. The Algebra Project is first and foremost an organizing project - a community organizing project - rather than a traditional program of school reform.

Radical Equations by Robert P. Moses