Liberation Equations.

I wondered whether I should have my hearing checked when I first heard that Bob Moses, the famed civil rights activist, was comparing the fight for voting rights in the 1960s to his current campaign to teach math to minority students. But give him a few minutes, and he'll convince you that he's not crazy.

"In the '60s, we were organizing around the right to vote for political access, and we were successful to a large extent in getting that," Moses told me in a phone interview earlier this year. "[Now] what we're using is algebra as an organizing tool for educational and economic access."

For the past twenty years, Moses has poured his energy into the Algebra Project. He defines it as "a national mathematics literacy effort aimed at helping low income students and students of color--particularly African American students--successfully achieve mathematical skills that are a prerequisite for full citizenship in the Information Age."

This spring, Moses came to Oakland for an Algebra Project workshop. "The sharecroppers that we worked with in the '60s, those who couldn't read and write, were the designated serfs of the Industrial Age," he told the multigenerational, largely African American crowd gathered at the West Oakland Senior Center. "They were designated to do a certain kind of work and have a certain kind of schooling--sharecropper schooling--that was appropriate to that work. What we are growing now in our cities are the designated serfs of the Information Technology Age. The jobs which are dead-end jobs are like the sharecropping jobs--chopping cotton and picking cotton--only you're chopping and picking in an urban area where you have a job which cannot lead anywhere and which cannot support a family."

Thirty-seven years ago, Moses was field secretary for SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), and the soft-spoken, visionary force inside both the Freedom Summer Project and the formation of the maverick Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The Harlem native had attended a high school for gifted children, later studied the philosophy of mathematics at Harvard, and eventually went on to work for the ministry of education in Tanzania.

It was while he was caring for his father and working as a math teacher in New York that he was first struck by the events of the civil rights movement.

"The sit-ins woke me up," he says in the first sentence of Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights, co-written with civil rights veteran Charles E. Cobb, Jr. "Until then, my black life was conflicted. The sit-ins hit me powerfully, in the soul as well as the brain."

In those volatile days in Mississippi, one of Moses's most powerful allies was Dave Dennis, who was then the Mississippi director for CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality). Like me, Dennis had profound skepticism when he heard about Bob Moses's latest organizing efforts. "Poor Bob, I thought," writes Dave Dennis in the foreword for Radical Equations. "He's lost his mind, `flipped out.' He's out here comparing math to the civil rights movement." But soon Dennis realized that his old colleague was on to something. "With so much history connecting us, I couldn't just shrug off Bob's new effort to organize around math literacy," Dennis writes. "Although I still had not come to any clear conclusions about the project in my own mind, I was beginning to sense its importance."

Dennis is now director of the Algebra Project's Southern Initiative, which is based in the same Mississippi Delta region where the two first met.

Dealing with resistance is nothing new to Bob Moses. "There's a big psychological gap to overcome," he told a television reporter back in 1964, referring to the obstacles activists faced during the voting rights movement. "There's what a lot of people call the psychology of fear on the part of most of the Negroes. They've been brainwashed. They think that somehow all of this is the business of the white man and that this is not something they're supposed to be doing."

The same is true for many people--not just African Americans--who don't understand why they need to study algebra.

I always hated math. I trace my revulsion back to a memorable day in the mid-1960s when our grade school homeroom teachers announced that our arithmetic books were being replaced with a new text: Sets and Numbers. Just when I was getting a handle on what fractions and percentages were all about, arithmetic was out and "new math" was in.

What I remember most about that time was a sense of confusion about how this thing called mathematics connected to my life. A trip to the corner store made me understand why I needed to learn to add, subtract, and multiply, but what the heck did I need integers and equations for?

Bob Moses explains why. "We need a discussion about education as our primary opportunity structure for everybody," he told the Oakland audience. "How are we going to put a floor under all of our children so that when they graduate from high school they have an option to go to college and they have the skills they need so they have access to a job that can support a family?"

As far as Moses is concerned, in the age of information technology, reading and writing are important, but education has to be built from the mathematics up. He's tired of black students being tracked away from math, and he's on a mission to get the black community to understand maths political and economic significance.

"It wasn't until those at the bottom made the demand that the system capitulated," Moses told me when speaking of the voting rights struggle. "You needed the force coming up from the bottom to get the people who control the levers of power to say we're going to overthrow those who stand in opposition to this happening. The same issue confronts us today. The young kids have got to make the demand first on themselves that, yes, this is our education and this is what we want, and then translate that demand into various institutions in the society."

Moses takes a dramatically different approach to teaching algebra. It calls for "a conceptual shift from arithmetic to algebraic thinking, by using experiences students find interesting--and understand intuitively--to open up the basic concepts of algebraic thinking," according to the project's web site. "A ride on a subway, a trip on a bus, or a walking tour become bases for understanding displacements."

The Project has spread its programs to a number of school sites around the nation, including in Boston, Chicago, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, New York, Oakland, and San Francisco. However, the majority of Algebra Project sites are located in the South: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, and, of course, the Mississippi Delta. Like the true organizer he is, Moses himself commutes a couple of times a week from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Jackson, Mississippi, to teach his special brand of algebra to students in the land of his political roots.

Back at the Oakland event, Moses, his wife, two of his children, Dave Dennis, and celebrities such as actor Danny Glover have gathered to spread the message of math in the Bay Area.

"When the cotton picking machine came in, from 1944 up until 1970, this country refugeed five million black people into all of the urban areas of the country," Moses tells the crowd. "And with them went sharecropper schooling. Are we going to have a discussion about the floor for our children? Are they all our children? This is the issue that our country hasn't addressed. I had to go to Tanzania to understand the look and the feel of a school system that valued each and every child, and we don't have that here in this country. So the question is are we going to get it? Do we have people who want to fight for that?"

Judging by the response from the audience in Oakland, the answer is a resounding yes.

Andrea Lewis is a San Francisco-based writer and co-host of the "Morning Show" on KPFA Radio in Berkeley, California.