About This Project

This project grew from an account of a conversation between Bob Moses and Stokely Carmichael I read in Bruce Watson's book "Freedom Summer." The two, both philosophy students, were discussing Gödel's Theorem. Kurt Gödel was a mathematician, a protege of Albert Einstein and would have been alive at the time of their conversation. I recognized the name from the "Science on Stage" class in which I became familiar with Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, although I would now have to resurrect that understanding.   

I then became fascinated with Bob Moses's Algebra Project, first that he presented math as a civil right, and secondly, that he discards the thought that some people just can't do math. My major was math and so I know it is possible. There have been advances made in teaching reading and writing literacy, as I know from experience with our dyslexic son, so it makes sense to me that advancement in math literacy is also reasonable.

It was also important for me to include some element of Brown v. Board in this project. A very dear friend, Victoria Benson, is the daughter of Maude Lawton and one of the children named in the Brown case. I read about Lucinda Todd advocating for her daughter Nancy, and from stories Victoria had told me, knew that her mother spoke up for her children.

No one mentions or writes about Bob Moses without describing the influence of Ella Baker. She impacted the struggle for civil rights for decades.

The Highlander Folk School, too, has had a similar unsung influence. Unsung is a pun because much of the civil rights music was a result of musicians at Highlander.

When I started this project I wanted to find personal, physical connections between and among the people and places along the way. I could find no evidence that anyone in Topeka participated in any of the Highlander workshops and I could find no evidence that Ella Baker was ever in Topeka, even though she was NAACP Director of Branches in the early 1940's, or that Lucinda Todd or Maude Lawton ever met her. It is possible that this evidence exists, just not where I know to look. So the connection I chose between them was the Brown decision. The Brown decision prompted Highlander to shift to desegregation workshops and it impacted Ella Baker's work in New York with the parent group.

An article written by Ryan S. Vincent to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision connected the math and music for me. He pointed out the well established relationship between music and math, the study of one aids the other, and argued that Lucinda Todd wanted music instruction for the broader math benefits. The article "No Child Left Behind, Only the Arts and Humanities: Emerging Inequalities in Education Fifty Years After Brown" was published in 2004 in the Washburn Law Review.