The story of the remarkable life of Civil Rights leader Bob Moses

From his role as one of the architects of the civil rights movement to his work with inner city children late into his life, Robert Moses was one of America’s most courageous, energetic, and influential leaders. Wary of the cults of celebrity he saw surrounding Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X and fueled by a philosophy that shunned leadership, Moses always labored behind the scenes. This first biography sheds significant light on the intellectual and philosophical worldview of a man who was rarely seen but whose work created a lasting impact on American life.

Moses spent almost three years in Mississippi trying to awaken the state’s Black citizens to their moral and legal rights before the fateful summer of 1964 would thrust him and the Freedom Summer movement into the national spotlight. We follow him through the civil rights years-his intensive, fearless tradition of community organizing, his involvements with SNCC and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and his negotiations with the Department of Justice-to his time in Canada after fleeing the draft for a war he opposed, through the decade he spent teaching in Tanzania. Returning in 1977 under President Carter’s amnesty program, Moses dedicated the rest of his life to the Algebra Project-an innovative program he established to teach math to Boston’s inner-city youth, an important extension of his tireless pursuit of equal rights.

Quiet and intensely private, Moses quickly became legendary as a man whose conduct exemplified leadership by example. And Gently He Shall Lead Them tells the story of this remarkable man, an elusive hero of the civil rights movement whose flight from adulation only served to increase his reputation as an intellectual and moral leader.