Freedom Rider shares legacy of civil rights struggle through new book
23rd May 2022 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
For many Americans, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s played out in abstract, from afar, in a place of the country that was foreign to them. The fight for equality and social justice didn’t really hit home or cut close to the bone for millions of American citizens, especially white Americans.
But for Louisiana native David Dennis Sr., the Civil Rights Movement was painful and intimate on an almost unbearable level. Like many of the Black leaders of the movement, the horrors and hatred he endured scarred him deeply, so much so that he retreated from the world and tried to erase the excruciating memories from his mind.
For Dennis and his courageous peers, the battleground was the Deep South – Mississippi in particular – far removed from the comforts of home and life on the sidelines. Even though many battles were ultimately won by Dennis and his colleagues in the Congress for Racial Equality, including the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Act of 1965, these victories were only gained through gut-wrenching losses stained with tears and blood.
“It’s been a very, very painful trip,” Dennis said. “I buried a lot of it, and nobody could get it out of me. I needed someone I trusted and loved to be able to tell my story.”
After decades of shrinking from the spotlight, and from his own history, Dennis found that person he needed to write his narrative – his son, David Dennis Jr.
Dennis Jr. had established himself as a leading American journalist and writer, with much of his work discussing political rights and social justice, but being asked by his father to narrate the elder Dennis’ harrowing life gave him the type of scoop, so to speak, with the potential to change and enrich society.
The product of the intergenerational collaboration was the new book, “The Movement Made Us: A Father, a Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride,” that recounts Dennis Sr.’s experiences as a Freedom Rider in Mississippi in the early-to mid-1960s.
Undertaken in the Deep South during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, the Freedom Rides brought together civil rights activists from across the country on buses that rode through the deeply segregated South in an effort to encourage people of color to reclaim their political and social rights from a Jim Crow society that used fear and terrorism to maintain a corrupt white supremacy.
The Dennises discussed the new book on a visit to the NOLA Art Bar cafe and lounge on St. Claude Avenue on May 13.
The Dennises told the audience that the new book represents how Dennis Sr.’s experiences as a Freedom Rider and as a leader in the Civil Rights Movement not only helped shape the man he became, but also enriched his son by imparting the wisdom and lessons the elder Dennis learned in the 1960s.
The younger Dennis also detailed how he ended up being shaped and influenced by his father’s traumatic but vital experiences and the lessons learned in the fight for freedom. He said the book represents the important role that family played in the Movement and the effect that traumatic events had on people’s family. He said writing the book helped him to reconcile his image of David Dennis as a freedom fighter with his image of David Sr. as a father.
The result is a lesson showing that the sacrifices experienced by civil rights leaders also impact their families. He said he’s learned the importance of one person simply getting involved with the fight to the overall effort.
Kirkus Reviews called the book “[t]imely in an era of renewed disenfranchisement and an instructive, important addition to the literature of civil rights.” And Library Journal Reviews stated, “Moving, evocative, and haunting, this father-son perspective on the civil rights movement is a necessary read and a great addition for all library collections.”
“We were making decisions about life and death at that age,” Dennis Sr. said as he fought back tears.
Two of the painful events that helped forge the legacy of selflessness, sacrifice and nobility of the civil rights workers were experienced personally by Dennis Sr., who at the time dug deep within himself to persevere and carry on the fight but was also so scarred by the traumas that he withdrew into a shell for decades.
Perhaps the most psychologically devastating blow for Dennis came in the summer of 1964, when a bout of bronchitis prevented him from accompanying three other Freedom Summer volunteers as the embarked to speak with members of a Black church that had been bombed by white supremacist terrorist.
While on the trek, those three volunteers – James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner – were brutally murdered by Ku Klux Klan members who were aided and abetted by local law enforcement.
The killings triggered outrage across the country and drew both empathy for the civil rights struggle and the attention of the FBI. For many years, Dennis Sr. shouldered feelings of crippling guilt and pain for not being with the three murdered men.
The second event that drew national headlines about Mississippi while also having a deeply personal and traumatic effect on Dennis was the assassination of his close friend, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, by a white supremacist in June 1963.
With those traumas added to dozens upon dozens of church bombings and a thousand people being arrested for fighting for equality, Dennis Sr. said, it all takes a lifelong toll.
“Those things you don’t forget,” he said.
David Dennis Sr. said one of the main reasons he decided to finally tell his history was to reclaim the tale of the Civil Rights Movement for Black Americans and the country as a whole.
“That part of my life was one that for a long time had its own narrative,” he said. “I’ve been telling people that we need to tell all of our stories. A lot of our history was buried because we didn’t talk about our history.”
This article originally published in the May 23, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
