About Dr. Janet
Janet Jemmott Moses was born in 1942 and grew up in the South Bronx of New York City. She attended public schools and graduated from Hunter College in 1962. In 1964, she left her teaching post at Wadleigh Junior High School in Harlem to join the ranks of the volunteers who had traveled to Mississippi to work on voter registration.
At the end of the summer, Janet joined the staff of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and worked in Natchez and Fayette County.
In 1965, she joined Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) in Lowndes, and a small band of SNCC staff including Bob Mants, Courtland Cox, Gloria Larry and Jimmy Rogers. They stayed in a small home of which the Jackson family allowed us to live. She worked on voter registration and organizing the Lowndes County Black Panther Party which was viewed as a political alternative to the national democratic party which had refused to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She also spent some time in Selma doing voter registration work.
Upon returning to New York City, she taught school for a brief period after which she and Bob Moses traveled to Tanzania where they were employed by the Tanzania Ministry of Education to teach at the Same Secondary School. There they established their family, Maisha, Omo, Taba, and Malaika.
Several years after returning to the U.S., Janet entered the Boston University School of Medicine with a Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship, and upon completing residency joined the department of Pediatrics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990. During her tenure, she was awarded the President’s Award for Community Service.
She retired in 2004 to attend to family and grandchildren, Zuri, Parris, and as of November, 2010, Krishna. Janet was active locally in the Cambridge Algebra Project, and is on the advisory board of The Young People’s Project. She is one of the contributors to “Hands on the Freedom Plow, Personal Accounts of Women in SNCC, published 2010 by University of Illinois Press.
