Moses began working with civil rights activists in 1960, becoming field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). As director of the SNCC's Mississippi Project in 1961, Moses traveled to Pike County and Amite County to try to register black voters. Comprising a majority in both counties, despite many people leaving in the Great Migration in the first half of the century, they had been utterly closed out of the political process since 1890. He pushed for the SNCC to engage in a "tactical nonviolence," a matter he discussed in an interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book "Who Speaks for the Negro?".