Janet Jemmott at SNCC conference, 1964
Janet Jemmott at a SNCC conference in Waveland, Mississippi, November 1964.
Janet Moses (née Jemmott), former pediatrician in the MIT Medical Department and civil-rights activist, served as a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field secretary in Mississippi. Raised in the South Bronx of New York, she left the United States with her husband Robert Moses in the late 1960s in protest of the Vietnam War, and they taught at schools in rural Tanzania. After their return to the U.S. in 1976, Moses earned her medical degree at the University of Boston.
While working as a pediatrician at M.I.T., she contributed as an advisory board member to Cambridge Young People’s Project (YPP), an offshoot of the Algebra Project begun by her husband. “My work as a field secretary,” she reflected, “in many ways, was more formative than my years at M.I.T.”