From the son of legendary civil rights organizer Robert P. Moses: a brilliant, unflinching memoir about becoming Black in America that interweaves voices from 3 generations of the Moses family
In The White Peril, Omo Moses deftly interweaves his own life story with excerpts from both his great-grandfather’s sermons and the writings of his father, the civil rights activist Bob Moses. The result is a powerful chorus of voices that spans 3 generations of an African American family, all shining a light on the Black experience, all calling fiercely for racial justice.
Omo was born in 1972 in Tanzania, where his parents had fled to escape targeted harassment by the US government. He did not encounter white supremacy until the family moved back to America when he was 4. Here he learned what it meant to be Black. He came of age in a Black enclave of Cambridge, Massachusetts, became a passionate basketball player, lived in the shadow of his father’s Civil Rights work but did not feel like a part of it until his college basketball career came to an unceremonious end. Unsure what to do next, he took up his father’s offer to go with him to Mississippi and teach math to Algebra Project students. Omo didn’t know it yet, but it was among those young people that he would find his purpose.
This book is at once a coming-of-age story, a multigenerational family memoir, an epic father-son road trip, a searing account of the Black male experience, and a work that powerfully revives Rev. Moses’s demand for liberation.
“The White Peril is the book I wish I had my whole life; it is astonishing, beautiful, courageous, luminous, heartrending, inspiring, fierce, sympathetic, provocative, necessary, unflinching, and, above all else, true. Braiding together a family history, a civil rights chronicle, and a moving account of his own coming of age under the ever-present threat of whiteness, Omo Moses has written an epic reaffirmation of Black diasporic life and a clarion call for justice. The White Peril is destined to be read and cherished.”
—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction recipient and author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“In this captivating collection of stories, reflections, interviews, and sermons, Omo Moses provides readers a glimpse into the Black struggle from the son of one of America’s most important leaders, Bob Moses. Part memoir, part poetry, part biography, and much more, The White Peril gives Moses’s readers insights into what it was like to be a child of the Black struggle in Tanzania, Mississippi, and Cambridge. With unapologetic honesty and candor, he conveys both the challenges and the beauty of being raised to understand why committing oneself to the struggle for justice is not a matter of choice but one of fate and destiny. Moses shows us what it is like to live a life dedicated to the uplift of the powerless. For those who need to be inspired during these bleak days, this book is just what you need.”
—Pedro Noguera, the Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean of the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education
“Intricately crafted, and a riveting read, this unputdownable whirlwind journeys through five generations of a Black family fighting for Black liberation, and a young man fighting to traverse the rocky distance between father and son. With sometimes lyrical, sometimes jarring prose, this moving memoir has achieved Omo’s stated goal—‘to let poetry sit side by side, sit inside the story.’ Omo has granted us a glimpse into the psyche of young Black manhood, and a window into the mind of his father, the brilliant visionary, Robert P. Moses.”
—Lisa Delpit, MacArthur Fellow and author of Other People’s Children and “Multiplication is for White People”
“The White Peril is an evocative and enlightening journey through America’s troubled past and hopeful future, seen through the eyes of a remarkable family.”
—Jeremy Dennis, lead artist and president of Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio, Inc.
“This book is a powerful experience. The intergenerational story laces Omo’s personal narrative with archival documents and the extraordinary histories of his father and great grandfather, emphasizing the constants and the particularities in their trajectories as Black men and in their connection to larger forces of way-making and struggle. It is a beautiful book. I didn’t want it to end.”
—Rachel E. Harding, co-director, Veterans of Hope Project
“In this book, equal parts a memoir, a biography of his legendary father, and an indictment, Omowale Moses deftly knits together distinct landscapes, multiple generations, and disparate classrooms to reprise and then converse with the codes and significations of an early twenty-first-century Black man. Amidst the prophecies of his great-grandfather about white perils, the testimonies of his father about Mississippi’s lethality, and the warmth and wrath of his mother sits Omo’s elegant meditation on his childhood in Tanzania, adolescence in Massachusetts, and young manhood in Mississippi. Adopting yet adapting his parents’ legacy of a life in Black struggle, Omo leads his readers to ponder how blood shapes destiny, how geography burdens memory. Moving seamlessly from the basketball courts he once ruled in Cambridge to the Delta schools he taught in, Omowale Moses writes with humor, hope, and painstaking honesty, rendering visible lines of descent, authority, and obligation by meandering dynamically back and forth across time, place, and purpose. A tender exploration of the spirit and flesh of one Black man and his forebears, the book is both a sweeping indictment of an old problem and an expansive call to action.”
—Margaret Burnham, author of By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners
“The White Peril is searing, honest, vulnerable, profound, and undeniable. I loved it. In the distance between Omo’s experience and mine, in the same place, at the same critical age, is the distance perhaps between black and white America. It is that distance that continues to test this country, to bedevil it, to confound it, to force people into all kinds of denial. I believe the way through that distance or perhaps across it are bridges . . . bridges built with love and truth simultaneously, that connect us. Though they don’t make us the same, they allow us access to one another. Those bridges, if they can be made, look in my mind’s eye precisely like The White Peril.”
—Ben Affleck, actor, writer, filmmaker and CEO, Artists Equity
“The White Peril is such an important book for this historical moment! Moses masterfully uses being a child of the Civil Rights Movement, as the eldest son of civil rights icons Bob and Janet Moses, to brilliantly contextualize this now moment!”
—Belvie Rooks, human rights advocate
Author’s Note
CHAPTER 1
In the Distance Between Us (I)
CHAPTER 2
The King of the Court
CHAPTER 3
Out of Africa
CHAPTER 4
Freedom Fighters
CHAPTER 5
Becoming Black
CHAPTER 6
Cookie and the Dust
CHAPTER 7
The Wild
CHAPTER 8
The MathLab
CHAPTER 9
American Heroes
CHAPTER 10
American Heroes, Continued
CHAPTER 11
Building Demand
CHAPTER 12
In the Distance Between Us (II)
CHAPTER 13
The King of the Port
CHAPTER 14
The White Peril
CHAPTER 15
Black Consciousness
CHAPTER 16
In the Distance Between Us (III)
CHAPTER 17
A Wave
EPILOGUE
The Young People’s Project
Acknowledgments
Notes