A Movement Veteran Speaks
A review of The Movement Made Us by David Dennis Jr. and David Dennis Sr.
For the younger generation, and even for elders, “the Civil Rights Movement” gets reduced to gauzy images and simple generalizations. There was a bus boycott, freedom riders, some demonstrators got beaten, voter registration campaigns spread, and the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was passed. The real story is much more horrifying — and more inspiring. In response to a campaign to win basic democratic rights, Black people and their allies were regularly tortured and bombed, and lynchings and shootings were common. White violence was systematic and constant, from the Klan and regular white people to the local police, and to the court system which never convicted the murderers.
The stunning thing about this story, both heartbreaking and heart-warming, is how courageously the local Black people all over Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama sacrificed for the movement. The Civil Rights Movement was not just about some students coming south to work on campaigns. It was the local people, church members, sharecroppers, drivers, factory workers, barbers and beauticians, who sustained the movement and protected it — often with arms and at risk for their own lives.
You think you know these stories, but you don’t know the half of it. This co-written memoir, The Movement Made Us, by David Dennis Sr. and his son David Dennis, Jr., helps you to come to understand the way the movement started and how it grew. You learn about the difficult personal choices and doubts that organizers faced. It was not always a story of heroes. Organizers often faced doubts about what to do next. One of the most powerful aspects of this book, this reckoning 60 years later, is Dennis’ honest reflection about his own early reluctance, his ambiguity about his choices, and then the real pain, survivor’s guilt and PTSD, for what he and others went through. He was at war for many years — but a war with a clear moral purpose. As surely as any soldier, he continues to suffer from a past that is still present. Dennis was a good friend to Medgar Evers, the Mississippi NAACP leader who was gunned down in 1963 in his own driveway, a few feet from his wife and three children. He worked with James Chaney and barely missed being in the car in 1964 with Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner the night they were murdered.
There’s a lot to be furious about in reading this story — certainly about the bald-faced violent racism which is still with us today. But Dennis takes us to the next level, beyond just the backwoods Klansmen. In 1964, in advance of the Democratic National Convention, the organizers in Mississippi decided, since they were denied the vote, to create their own electoral system, hold delegate meetings, and put up a slate to challenge the legitimacy of the state Democratic Party. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party sent a whole delegation to Atlantic City in August and challenged the traditional delegation at the credentials committee. It’s a story you must understand. Fanny Lou Hamer, a sharecropper and leader of the movement, gave a speech that still defines the struggle today. In the end, no surprise, Lyndon Johnson made sure that the freedom delegation was not seated.
Dennis writes: “So many of us went into the Democratic National Convention believing that this country would value the institution of democracy over white supremacy, but we learned that democracy loses its integrity as soon as it no longer serves whiteness above all.”
I won’t even try to capture the powerful moments and the deep insights that can be found in this important memoir and its importance today. That is for you to discover in Dave Dennis’ own words.
But I am reminded, brought back to, affirmed in the understanding that white supremacy, the oppression of captive and oppressed peoples inside and outside the borders of the US, continues to be the lynchpin of capitalist oppression. Call it what you want — colonialism, racial capitalism — it has been and is at the center of this unjust order.
David Dennis reminds us that violence is, as Rap Brown said, as American as cherry pie. He had once hoped that in ten years, twenty years, things would be better — it would be a new day of freedom and shared abundance. When there is a conflict like World War II or the Vietnam War, generally there is an end, a truce is signed, and the two parties can move forward. But the war against Indigenous people, Black and Brown people, has no ending, no peace treaty. For me, for white people, this demands that we recommit, that we find a way, every day, to be in solidarity with this struggle, as it is our struggle too.
