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| Affiliation | Democratic |
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| Name | William Roger "Bill" Moss |
| Address | 1640 Franklin Avenue
Columbus, Ohio 43205, United States |
| Email | bmoss@hbcuconnect.com |
| Website | http://www.billmoss.org |
| Born |
September 17, 1935 |
| Died |
August 02, 2005
(70 years) |
| Contributor | Thomas Walker |
| Last Modifed | Thomas Walker
Aug 08, 2005 08:49pm |
| Tags |
African - Black - Married - Army - Imprisoned - NAACP - Baptist - Christian - Straight -
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| Info | From an article in the Columbus Dispatch by John Futty from October 15, 1995:
Bill Moss laughs when he says it but vows it is no joke.
"I'm gonna win. I will be the next mayor of Columbus. Mark it down. It's gonna be the mother of all upsets."
The laugh that follows is hearty and infectious. Moss says it is the laugh of a man who is supremely confident.
Despite polls that show the Democratic challenger trailing Mayor Greg Lashutka by as much as 3-to-1, Moss contends it is his destiny to become mayor. It is his time, he says, and he will seize the moment in the Nov. 7 election.
To amplify his point, Moss quotes from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
"There is a tide in the lives of men which, taken at the flood, leads to victory," Moss said, changing fortune to victory.
"On such a full sea are we now afloat; and we must take the current as it serves, or lose our venture."
Moss, 60, is fond of dropping quotations from Shakespeare, the Bible and such historic figures as Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln into his conversations or speeches.
Though Moss honed his ability to memorize quotes during a year of studying theater arts at Los Angeles City College, he believes the skill is a reflection of the strong education he received at all-black schools in segregated South Miami, Fla.
"Our schools had inferior facilities, inferior buses, old books. But the teachers, man, they were good," he said.
"They never told us we were at risk. There was no question about whether we could learn. They taught us. The foundation I got from those schools prepared me to extend my education in the world. And I think I'm highly educated."
Attending school within a close-knit neighborhood - where everyone knew each other and all the adults were surrogate parents to all the children - would provide the foundation for Moss' eventual opposition to busing for racial balance in schools.
Moss became convinced in the 1970s that busing would destroy neighborhoods, further divide the races and do little for education.
Busing became the defining issue for Moss, who left a career in radio broadcasting to run for Congress on an anti-busing platform in 1976. He finished a distant third in a three-way race, but a year later he used the same issue to win a seat on the Columbus Board of Education.
His first term on the school board was stormy, with Moss serving as the lone voice against the district's desegregation plans, which included busing.
Now completing his third term on the board, Moss is still seen as a maverick but believes the passage of time has vindicated his stance on busing.
"I should be chronicled as a hero," he said. "It should be, 'Here was the most courageous man of the times, who had the courage to stand up and call attention to the disastrous results of this policy that was being implemented.' Because all of the things I predicted have come to pass."
Those who knew Moss during his childhood in South Miami aren't surprised he has become an outspoken political figure.
"I knew he was going to be a leader," said Edith Coverson, who taught social studies to Moss at George Washington Carver Junior High School. "He was an excellent student and very opinionated. And he came from a very religious family, people who believed in family values."
Moss was the third of six children born to Daniel and Mattie Moss. His father was from Crooked Island in the Bahamas and moved to Florida in 1918 to pick oranges for a living. He eventually established his own nurseries and yard-care business, where his children worked at his side.
"To know me is to know my father, I hope. He is the greatest man I have ever known," Moss said.
Moss recalls helping his father cut and trim up to four lawns in a day, then watching his father spend the evening grading vegetables that he would take to market before sunrise. "My father had three heart attacks, and he could still outwork me after the third one," Moss said. Daniel Moss died in 1986.
Moss' mother is 84 and remains active in the Church of God in Christ, serving as director of women for the church's eastern Florida district.
Though Moss identifies closely with his father, there are those who believe he inherited one of his most noteworthy traits - his oratorical skills - from his mother.
"I say it humbly; but that's what others say, that he got it from me," said Mattie Moss, who raised her children in the church.
Bill Moss showed a talent for singing, which was showcased during Sunday services.
"I can't think of Bill ever giving me any trouble," Mattie Moss said. "He was very serious minded."
Beyond the importance of faith in God, Daniel and Mattie Moss instilled in their children a belief in the value of education. All six earned college degrees and established professional careers that include dentistry and landscape architecture.
James Faison, who attended school with Bill Moss from elementary through high school, said Moss stood apart from other classmates.
"He was the kind of fellow who always wanted to learn," Faison said. "He wanted to know the definitions of words. He wanted to know more and more about everything there was. It was nothing for him to spend four or five hours in the library."
After graduating from high school in 1954, Moss joined the Army and was attatched to an Air Force base in France. There he joined a singing group that won an international competition and went on tour with other winning acts to military bases throughout the United States and the Far East.
The taste of show business was so enticing that Moss headed for Los Angeles shortly after being discharged from the Army in 1957.
"Like the rest of them, I just knew the world was dying to see me," he said. "I was going to be a star."
He attended Los Angeles City College, managed some liquor stores; worked as a music librarian at a radio station; did some master-of-ceremonies work at nightclubs; and, after four years, "became disenchanted with the culture out there".
Moss moved to Miami in 1962 and went to work as a disc jockey. After two years, he was offered a job at WVKO radio (1580 AM) in Columbus. He arrived in the city on a rainy night in March 1964.
"As soon as I got here, I got the feeling that this was the place," he said.
He spent the next six years at the station, where he became a popular personality who brought live shows by such groups as the Temptations and the Four Tops to the city and hosted dances all over central Ohio.
It was at one of these dances in 1966 that he met Ruth Coleman. She was a school teacher and adviser to a group of teen-age girls who had invited Moss to spin records for a dance at the Downtown YWCA. After the dance, Ruth asked the DJ what she could do to thank him. He asked her to have lunch with him.
A year later, they were married in the YWCA's chapel.
"He was completely different from the image you have of a disc jockey," Ruth Moss said of their courtship. "He was a true gentleman and very intellectual."
Since 1968, the Mosses have lived in the brick duplex on Franklin Avenue where Ruth Moss grew up. Ruth's mother continues to live with them in the Near East Side home.
The Mosses have four children. The youngest, Elynor, 17, is a senior at Walnut Ridge High School.
Moss also has a daughter from a previous marriage, Sonya Stephens, who lives in California.
Ruth Moss, who teaches science at Franklin Alternative Middle School, has been her husband's staunchest supporter through a series of business and political ventures, some of which provided little financial return.
"There were times we had to choose between a gallon of gasoline, a package of diapers and a carton of milk," she said. "I'm thankful for those times. Those times of sacrifice made us a strong couple."
For the first three years of their marriage, the couple owned Nassau Daddy's, a restaurant that specialized in barbecued ribs. The business shared one of Moss' radio nicknames - which paid tribute to his Bahamian roots - and featured his own cooking.
Moss spent the next four years operating his own record company, Capsoul Records, a job that kept him on the road promoting music throughout the eastern United States. Ruth Moss said some of her best memories are of her husband returning from those trips at night, gathering all the children in one bed and regaling them with tales of his experiences on the road.
Moss quit the record business in 1974 and returned to radio, but his travels to major cities that were embroiled in debates over busing gave him the inspiration for his first political bid.
The first race, in 1976, established him as a political renegade. Many in the Franklin County Democratic Party have yet to forgive Moss for his independent candidacy for Congress, which attracted just enough votes to be blamed for the defeat of the party's endorsed candidate, Fran Ryan.
Moss ran three successful campaigns for school board and failed in two runs for Congress and two races for state representative in the ensuing years but didn't receive an endorsement from county Democrats until this year, when he emerged as the only person willing to challenge Lashutka.
Ruth Moss said she has been able to shrug off all the criticism leveled at her husband because he never seems rattled by it.
"I let him fight those battles," she said. "He does it so well. I just relax. He's doing what's right and what's principled, so I have faith that everything will work out."
Besides his wife, Moss' closest confidant is probably Robb Weind, who met Moss while campaigning for state representative during the late 1970s.
"I ran and lost three times for state representative and said 'OK, I'm through,'" Weind said. "But Bill doesn't quit. That's a tribute to him. He's one of those people who keeps standing and fighting."
Weind said he most admires Moss as "one heck of a family man" who cooks up the best dish of ribs, pigeon peas and rice he has ever eaten.
And he doesn't know anyone who is more determined.
"If you analyze it from a realistic standpoint, you think, 'He'll never be mayor.' But I will never write him off. Deep inside, he thinks he's going to pull this off, and I have to admire him for that."
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Ardent anti-school busing activist. Leader of a nationwide boycott of Columbus Ohio.
Author of the book "School Desegregation - Enough Is Enough."
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