The White Peril

A Family Memoir

By: Omo Moses

Narrated by: Kevin Free

From the son of legendary civil rights organizer Robert P. Moses: a brilliant, unflinching memoir about becoming Black in America that interweaves voices from 3 generations of the Moses family

In The White Peril, Omo Moses deftly interweaves his own life story with excerpts from both his great-grandfather's sermons and the writings of his father, the civil rights activist Bob Moses. The result is a powerful chorus of voices that spans 3 generations of an African American family, all shining a light on the Black experience, all calling fiercely for racial justice.

Omo was born in 1972 in Tanzania, where his parents had fled to escape targeted harassment by the US government. He did not encounter white supremacy until the family moved back to America when he was 4. Here, he learned what it meant to be Black. He came of age in a Black enclave of Cambridge, Massachusetts, became a passionate basketball player, lived in the shadow of his father’s Civil Rights work but did not feel like a part of it until his college basketball career came to an unceremonious end. Unsure what to do next, he took up his father’s offer to go with him to Mississippi and teach math to Algebra Project students. Omo didn’t know it yet, but it was among those young people that he would find his purpose.

This book is at once a coming-of-age story, a multigenerational family memoir, an epic father-son road trip, a searing account of the Black male experience, and a work that powerfully revives Rev. Moses’s demand for liberation.

©2025 Omo Moses (P)2025 Beacon Press Audio

Critic reviews

“The White Peril is the book I wish I had my whole life; it is astonishing, beautiful, courageous, luminous, heartrending, inspiring, fierce, sympathetic, provocative, necessary, unflinching, and, above all else, true. Braiding together a family history, a civil rights chronicle, and a moving account of his own coming of age under the ever-present threat of whiteness, Omo Moses has written an epic reaffirmation of Black diasporic life and a clarion call for justice. The White Peril is destined to be read and cherished.”
—Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction recipient and author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“In this captivating collection of stories, reflections, interviews, and sermons, Omo Moses provides readers a glimpse into the Black struggle from the son of one of America’s most important leaders, Bob Moses. Part memoir, part poetry, part biography, and much more, The White Peril gives Moses’s readers insights into what it was like to be a child of the Black struggle in Tanzania, Mississippi, and Cambridge. With unapologetic honesty and candor, he conveys both the challenges and the beauty of being raised to understand why committing oneself to the struggle for justice is not a matter of choice but one of fate and destiny. Moses shows us what it is like to live a life dedicated to the uplift of the powerless. For those who need to be inspired during these bleak days, this book is just what you need.”
—Pedro Noguera, the Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean of the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education

“Intricately crafted, and a riveting read, this unputdownable whirlwind journeys through five generations of a Black family fighting for Black liberation, and a young man fighting to traverse the rocky distance between father and son. With sometimes lyrical, sometimes jarring prose, this moving memoir has achieved Omo’s stated goal—‘to let poetry sit side by side, sit inside the story.’ Omo has granted us a glimpse into the psyche of young Black manhood, and a window into the mind of his father, the brilliant visionary, Robert P. Moses.”
—Lisa Delpit, MacArthur Fellow and author of Other People’s Children and “Multiplication is for White People”