Robert Parris Moses graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1952 and received his B.A. from Hamilton College in 1956. He earned an M.A. in philosophy at Harvard; in 1958 he began teaching at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx of New York City. Also in 1958, he was private tutor to singer Frankie Lymon, of The Teenagers, and credits his experience visiting Black sections of numerous towns with the doo-wop group for his recognition of the emergence of a distinct urban Black culture scattered across the nation.