The Movement Made Us

December 1, 2021

Multi-award-winning freelance writer/commentator David J. Dennis Jr. serves as visiting professor of journalism at Morehouse College, while civil rights veteran David J. Dennis Sr. is one of the original Freedom Riders, traveling from Montgomery, AL, to Jackson, MS, in 1961. This father-and-son memoir travels, too, moving from the civil rights movement of the 1960s to today's Black Lives Matter as the authors share stories of engagement and activism. At once intriguing history and a memoir of comfort, closeness, and revelation, this work was short-listed for the 2021 J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progressz Award. With a with a 75,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 14, 2022
The heavy toll exacted by the fight against Jim Crow is tallied in this gripping memoir. Dennis Jr. reconstructs the experiences—with details tweaked and dialogue “polished”—of his father, Dennis Sr., an official for the Congress of Racial Equality who organized lunch counter sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and voter registration drives in Louisiana and Mississippi from 1961 to 1964. Dennis Sr. confronted vicious white mobs and menacing sheriffs on backwoods roads; was beaten, jailed, and threatened with death; and suffered immense grief and guilt following the murders of his colleague Medgar Evers and Freedom Summer workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman. Recollections brought to life in subtle and evocative prose—as Dennis Sr. departed for Mississippi, he recalls, “my mother was trying to hum church songs to herself, but I could hear her voice wavering underneath her harmonies”—paint him and his fellow activists as heroic but fallible, often terrified of the dangers inherent in their work and resentful of leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., when they seemed to be dodging those risks. As he hardened himself to the necessity of ordering volunteers to undertake perilous organizing missions, he felt that he was “losing humanity.” This captures a remarkably intimate and vivid portrait of the human side of the civil rights movement.

Starred review from May 1, 2022

David Dennis Sr. has a unique story to tell. As an organizer of the Freedom Rides, lunch counter sit-ins, and voter registration drives in the American Deep South in the early 1960s, he saw firsthand the cruelty of white Southerners during the civil rights movement and lived to tell the tale. He experienced frustration and anger at higher-ups in the movement, who he perceived weren't in the trenches and putting their lives on the line for Black rights. He grieved for friends who lost their lives fighting for their rights. He feared for his own life, and feared for who he was becoming. This oral history is recorded by his son, Dennis Jr., who also chronicles how his own work as a journalist at Andscape is influenced by that of his father. This memoir of survival is critical to understanding the movement from the perspective of the people on the ground. VERDICT 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.--Ahliah Bratzler

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2022
A young Black activist revisits his father's role in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. "How many bubbles are on a bar of soap?" That was a typical Mississippi voting-eligibility question during the late Jim Crow era--impossible to answer but sufficient to deny Black citizens the right to vote. "Wrong answer, no voter registration," recalls Dennis Sr., who had significant involvement in key historical moments, often at great danger. He came into the movement reluctantly, determined to become an engineer and settle into an ordinary life. Instead, drawn into it at a time of lunch-counter protests and marches for justice, he faced down the violence of police and White supremacists. "I was aware of racial terror, like any Black kid, especially in the South," he writes. "I sat in the back of buses. I picked cotton for white men who owned the land we sharecropped on. I heard them call me 'boy' and [N-word] and I knew that speaking up would get me and my family killed." Cultivating friendships with James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer ("a product of everything Mississippi could do to Black folks, especially Black women"), and other leading lights of the movement, Dennis Sr. continued his activism into the 1970s, when, weary (and none too impressed with many clueless White would-be allies), he slipped into despair and drugs, "lost in his own fury," as his son describes it. Reinvigorated by the example of Robert Moses, he regained his lost idealism in time to see the necessary revival of civil rights activism in a time of retrograde violence and oppression. Writes Dennis Jr., "Growing up with these people taught me that to be Black in America and part of the Movement was to have fought a war on American soil." Timely in an era of renewed disenfranchisement and an instructive, important addition to the literature of civil rights.

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