Bob Moses, civil rights legend, dead at age 86

Moses was born in New York City in January 1935 and grew up in Harlem, according to his biography on Stanford University’s King Encyclopedia of civil rights figures. He earned a master’s degree in philosophy from Harvard University in 1957.

Moses was the architect of the 1964 voter registration campaign, the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, among several other civil rights projects.

He was a leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi when three civil rights workers were murdered by a group of men that included a Mississippi deputy sheriff. He also helped lead an ill-fated attempt to sit African-American delegates from Mississippi at the segregated 1964 Democratic National Convention.

“Bob Moses was a giant, a strategist at the core of the civil rights movement,” Johnson said in the statement released Sunday. “Through his life’s work, he bent the arc of the moral universe towards justice, making our world a better place. He fought for our right to vote, our most sacred right.”

“He knew that justice, freedom and democracy were not a state, but an ongoing struggle. So may his light continue to guide us as we face another wave of Jim Crow Laws. His example is more important now than ever,” the statement continued.

CNN reached out to the family for more information on his death.