Civil rights leader Bob Moses has died at the age of 86. Bob Moses worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to register voters across Mississippi. A former high school teacher, he went on to found the Algebra Project, devoted to improving access to education, particularly in math, for students of color. In 2009, Democracy Now! spoke with Bob Moses on the first day of the Obama presidency about the ongoing challenges in education.

Bob Moses: “In our country, I think we run sharecropper education. … So, if we carry that forward into the information age, then we will have serfs in our cities, just like we had serfs in the Delta of Mississippi in the industrial era. And this is the huge challenge facing our country. I think what we need is a movement for our constitutional rights. We need a constitutional amendment, something which simply says every child in the country is a child of the country and is entitled to a quality public school education.”