At a time when voting rights are under assault, it is important to study the legacy of Bob Moses, a brilliant community organizer who died last Saturday at age eighty-six. Moses was a key architect of the movement to enlist Southern black workers and sharecroppers to register to vote, a campaign that eventually pressured Congress to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Moses attended his first civil rights rally in Newport News, Virginia in 1960. The fiery Rev. Wyatt Walker had just delivered a rousing speech extolling the virtues of Martin Luther King Jr as the leader of the Civil Rights Movement. Moses, then twenty-five, made his way to the front of the crowd. As Taylor Branch reports in the first book of his King trilogy, Parting the Waters, Moses asked Walker, “Why do you keep saying one leader? Don’t you think we need a lot of leaders?”

Moses recalled that after participating in that demonstration, he had a “feeling of release” after a lifetime of accommodating himself to constant racial slights. “My whole reaction through life to such humiliation was to avoid it,” Moses recalled, “keep it down, hold it in, play it cool.”