The 3rd Bob Moses Conference Experience will be held virtually on April 27 and 28, 2024, and will focus on education and mass incarceration. We anticipate that the conference will contribute to building a platform for grassroots activism and policies crafted to truly undo the remnants of slavery. In order to chart a new course, we must understand where we have been.

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Reconstruction presented a blueprint for the re-founding of a nation that no longer teetered atop the backs of 4 million enslaved Africans. This was to be a liberated nation, freed from the racial apartheid structures of its founding. Reconstruction placed the country at its most crucial and enduring crossroads: multiracial democracy rooted in the Bill of Rights, or a racially hierarchical society in which the descendants of the enslaved–as a group–would be locked into a status of second-class citizenship. Now, 158 years since the Civil War, the country continues to struggle at these crossroads such that while Black people experience America as a multiracial democracy when using public accommodations, and some for the purposes of their individual advancement, far too many experience the nation as a caste system for purposes of their education, and the likelihood of their imprisonment.

 

Today, most of the worst of American K-12 public education is offered to children in Black schools, for the descendants of people brought here forcibly for their manual labor in a system that no longer exists. In 1961, In his book, “Slums And Suburbs”, James Conant, President of Harvard noted, “As we now recognize so plainly, but so belatedly, a caste system finds its clearest manifestation in an educational system.” People are familiar with the characterization of bad schools being pipelines to prison. This is too simplistic: 66% of America’s prison population is Black and Latino. Black men, comprising 7% of America’s population comprise almost 40% of the country’s prison population! For these citizens in name, incarceration functions as internal deportation. We urgently need a vision and a plan for public education that will provide an alternative to the de facto current plan, of investing in imprisonment rather than in educational opportunity.

 

The Bob Moses Legacy Conference series is a serious attempt to support the thinking and doing necessary to help the country move in the direction of building a democracy in the spirit of Reconstruction. This is the work we would like to take on.

 

PLEASE JOIN US.

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Supported by The Bob Moses Fund of the Cambridge Community Foundation, by donations from participants, and collaborating organizations and institutions.