The Movement Made Us

A Father, a Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride

David J. Dennis Jr., David J. Dennis Sr.

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780063011434
• eBook ISBN: 9780063011441
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

A STEPHEN CURRY'S BOOK CLUB PICK

SOUTHERN INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS ALLIANCE BESTSELLER

“A story of triumph and resilience centered around those who dedicated their lives to the Civil Rights movement. It reminds us that, in order to truly appreciate how far we’ve come—and how far we still have to go—we must acknowledge the past and pay homage to those who laid the foundation. It reminds us that everyday people can be heroes if they stand up for what’s right. It reminds us that we’re not alone in our experiences, and that if we work together, we can make impactful change.”—Stephen Curry

“The Movement Made Us takes literature to a momentous Southern Black space to which I honestly never thought a book could take us. This is literally the Movement that made us and both Davids love us whole here with a creation that is as ingenious as it is soulfully sincere. Stunning.”—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

A dynamic family exchange that pivots between the voices of a father and son, The Movement Made Us is a unique work of oral history and memoir, chronicling the extraordinary story of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and its living legacy embodied in Black Lives Matter. David Dennis Sr, a core architect of the movement, speaks out for the first time, swapping recollections both harrowing and joyful with David Jr, a journalist working on the front lines of change today. 

Taken together, their stories paint a critical portrait of America, casting one nation’s image through the lens of two individual Black men and their unique relationship. Playful and searching, anxious and restorative, fearless and driving, this intimate memoir features scenes from across David Sr’s life, as he becomes involved in the movement, tries to move beyond it, and ultimately returns to it to find final solace and new sense of self—revealing a survivor who travels eternally with a cabal of ghosts.  

A crucial addition to Civil Rights history, The Movement Made Us is the story of a nation reckoning with change and the hopes, struggles, setbacks, and triumphs of modern Black life. This is it: the extant chronicle of why we live, why we move, and for what we are made. 

IX.

War in Mississippi

“Looks like my desk is the first tour stop for outsiders, huh? Someone must have told you that I like it when you all come to Mississippi looking for trouble.” It was spring 1962. Medgar Evers was standing in his office at the Masonic Temple in West Jackson, a few buildings down from the CORE office we shared with SNCC, the first time I met him. Tom Gaither had given me names of people I needed to get to know if I was going to survive Mississippi and Medgar was at the top of the list.

The son of a sawmill worker and laundress from Decatur, Mississippi, Evers would go on to serve in World War II, fighting in France and Germany before returning to his home state. He would become the NAACP field secretary in 1954, traveling through the state visiting churches and preaching the sermon of voter registration. He’d also spend much of his time investigating killings and missing Black folks, doing what he could for every family who lost someone. The NAACP was the most established organization in Mississippi, but being caught with a membership card was one way Black people got lynched. Members even hid their cards in tin cans in their backyards as an act of survival. “Here’s what you need to know about Medgar,” Tom told me. “He keeps his membership card in his damn pocket.”

“Where you from, kid?” Medgar’s warmth and confidence were evident from behind his desk, even though he was trying to give me a hard time. “Actually, you don’t have to answer that. I’ve known about you since the Freedom Rides. I knew y’all were coming back. You never really leave Mississippi.”

“I guess that’s true, sir. I’m back here because I want to do what I can to get as many Black voters as possible.”

“Hm. Well, Mr. Dennis. What if I told you that you outsiders are going to just show up here and get people killed? What if I told you that you and those SNCC kids running around were reckless and the sharecroppers and seamstresses were doing what they could on their own time and are doing it safely? What if I told you we didn’t really need you here?”

I started talking before I had formed an answer. “If I go around this state and people tell me that they don’t need me or any of my people then I’ll knock on this office door again and ask you to drive me to the bus station so I can get on my way back to Louisiana.”

Medgar got up from his desk and slowly walked over to me, his navy-blue suit fitting immaculately. He extended his hand and smiled this big smile that felt like a hug. “Well then all I can say is welcome to the real Mississippi. You got time for Smackover’s?”

Smackover’s would be the place Medgar and I would go for coffee or a plate of soul food and sweet tea. It’s where I would get to know the man I’d call my best friend.

“I admire you kids over there in SNCC and CORE, even though y’all all got screws loose.” He was fifteen years older than me, so he loved calling us kids. “Sometimes the NAACP won’t mix it up on the street level like we need to and you kids just . . . y’all just get your tails beat like it’s nothing.”

“That’s part of it, right? I’ve never quite learned how to get anything done without taking a beating. But you’re the one with the damn NAACP card. You’re just as ready to die as any of us.”

“That’s where we differ. I love us and I want us to be free. But I have a wife and three babies at home. You got kids, Dave?”

“I, uh, do not.” I’d forgotten to even consider such a possibility.

“Didn’t think so. The Movement will go on without me if it has to. Those babies in my house won’t. Trust me, you’ll be less willing to fall in front of bullets when you have to kiss a family goodbye every day. If not, you’re not doing those kids any good anyway. And I got two guns in that trunk that say that even if I invite danger, danger coming to me is getting a hell of a welcome gift.”

Medgar would drive me around Mississippi, introducing me to every person he thought I needed to know. He could talk business with Black lawyers and doctors and to farmers about how the crops were growing, from Indianola to Hattiesburg. All the while, he taught me about Mississippi. People embraced me because Medgar told them to. I would have never survived without him.

Mississippi was a story of Black folks risking their lives for representation in the face of devastation. Mississippi reminded me of what I had learned in Shreveport: The Movement lived in backwoods and shadows, where resisting was the most deadly thing you could do. The misapprehension about the Movement was that CORE, SNCC, and all the activists who descended upon the state saved the people who were being victimized by white supremacy. The opposite is true. It was the Black folks in every crevice of the state who fed us, kept us alive, and set the blueprint for the actions we’d take once we got there. They treated us like we were their children, caring for us and guiding us. We were kids raised by a community that was just trying to survive.

Our organizations brought more resources and national attention to the cause in Mississippi, but we all only accomplished anything thanks to the bravery and brilliance that were already there. We weren’t saviors. We were beneficiaries and peers all learning how to get free together. Mississippians showed us the back roads that allowed us to escape deadly pursuits. They kept us in their homes overnight when it was too dark to drive. They showed us how to organize and whom to organize. The Movement didn’t come to Mississippi. Mississippi was the Movement.

Before any of us stepped foot in the state, hell, before I had even left the plantation in Shreveport, it was Ella Baker who charged through Mississippi and organized Black folks—some of them reluctant to put their lives at risk—to charter and become members of local NAACP chapters. Mrs. Baker went city by city, church by church, persuading communities that they could make a difference. While not every city would immediately start a chapter, everyone would note that Baker’s tour through the state was the impetus for locals to even listen to us in subsequent years. If Medgar built the foundation of the Mississippi Movement, Ella Baker drew up its schematics.

I spent my first few months in Mississippi getting to know as many communities as possible to see what CORE could do. My only real experience in Mississippi prior to this was on the jail-cell floors of Parchman and in courtrooms awaiting sentencing. But now I had to make the state my home, a state that had only shown me that it wanted me dead.

The air was different in Mississippi. Louisiana heat was thick, hugging your body like a wet blanket and swallowing you whole. Mississippi heat came from the top down, bearing down on your shoulders and your scalp. The dirt roads would kick up so much dust that every night I felt like I had a coat of debris over my body. Some days I feel like I’m still showering it off. And every day there was someone to remind you that there was a long road ahead and you were lucky to be alive. My home base was Jackson, the state capital, but I had to move around the small towns—Canton, Meridian, Hattiesburg, the Delta—because that’s where so much of the work was.

I’d travel those towns and learn that there was no one segment of Black Mississippians resisting. Every group, from the businesspeople and landowners to the teachers and the middle class to the low-wage workers, fought in their own way, however they could. I’d meet Amzie Moore, the postal worker and service-station owner who’d fought for voting rights since the 1950s. There was Dr. Aaron Henry, the Clarksdale pharmacist who was the state president of the NAACP, who welcomed SNCC and CORE to the state with open arms. R. L. T. Smith had run for Congress by then. Mrs. Lenon Woods housed us in her properties in Hattiesburg. Vernon Dahmer, also in Hattiesburg, was a farmer and landowner who presided over the Forrest County NAACP. E. W. Steptoe owned a farm in Amite County where he would advise, front money, and help organize voters. What’s remarkable about many of these heroes is that Black landowners were allowed to vote with little impediment from angry whites. Their numbers were so few that white folks didn’t mind their relatively nonessential impact on any election. These men and women only incurred wrath when they tried to get others, namely the sharecroppers, to vote. They dedicated their lives so the rest of their people could vote, knowing that doing so put their families at risk, their businesses in jeopardy, and their houses in the Klan databases as targets for firebombs. Their homes were known to every racist in every town. As were the jobs they held and the schools their children attended. There was no cover. And yet they persisted, doing what they could.

Middle-class Black folks, mostly made up of teachers, get a lot of flak because so many of them were reluctant to involve themselves publicly with the Movement. But they were typically the biggest earners for extended families who depended on them for survival. Any outward involvement resulted in being blackballed from working. Still, many donated in private and others, like Victoria Gray from Palmers Crossing, ended up investing wholly into the Movement.

Meanwhile, the sharecroppers, lumber workers, and low-wage earners gathered in secret. Though most of the land was owned by white people, it was the Black sharecroppers who cultivated it. Many of them lacked access to schooling as children and couldn’t read or do much math, so they would get screwed out of the money they were owed for their work. Black families would do enough work to justify being paid hundreds of dollars a month in wages but end up with just a few dollars in payouts, if anything at all. Often, the white landowners would provide sharecroppers with basic essentials they couldn’t afford on their wages and hold it against them as debt. As a result, the workers ended up spending many of their years slaving to pay off fabricated loans. If the sharecroppers moved wrong, they’d lose everything. And nobody would miss them if they happened to disappear.

There was one person who stood as tall as anyone else even though she had nothing to her name but fight, a voice, and a light. That person was Fannie Lou Hamer.

I’d heard about Mrs. Hamer soon after I got to Mississippi. She and seventeen other Black people who had been attending voter registration meetings at local churches eventually hopped on a bus—rented by Amzie Moore—in their hometown of Ruleville and rode to nearby Indianola to register to vote. They stared down armed guards and police officers and walked into the courthouse. Mrs. Hamer, the youngest of twenty children, who could read and write, passed the literacy test but was denied her registration when she failed to interpret the sixteenth section of the Mississippi Constitution. This was a typically impossible question to answer, right along with another popular query: “How many bubbles are on a bar of soap?” Wrong answer, no voter registration.

When the group was on its way back to Ruleville, police stopped the driver and fined him thirty dollars for having a bus that was too yellow. As police interrogated the driver, fear took over the riders, worried that they were going to be harassed, jailed, or worse. Then they heard Mrs. Hamer singing her salvation song, “This Little Light of Mine,” which would become her trademark when her voice was needed to pull us out of the worst of our despair. Her voice alone calmed the panic as the bus cautiously made its way back to Ruleville.

By the time she arrived back at the Marlow plantation where she and her husband lived, she’d already have a warning waiting on her: Stop trying to register to vote or you will lose your home and job.

“I didn’t go down there to register for you, I went down there to register for myself,” she told W. D. Marlow, the man who owned the land she worked and lived on. “And I ain’t gonna stop trying to vote.” Marlow told her he had no choice but to fire her and asked her to leave. Immediately. For the right to vote, Mrs. Hamer had risked—and lost—it all. She showed up to the next SNCC meeting, undeterred, to tell her story to a captivated gathering.

Mrs. Hamer was a product of everything Mississippi could do to Black folks, especially Black women. She walked with a limp because she suffered from polio when she was six. She had to drop out of school at twelve to sharecrop and help support her family. In 1961, she went to the hospital for minor surgery and had been given a hysterectomy against her will. The process had become so commonplace in the state that it would be referred to as a “Mississippi appendectomy.” The final straw was being removed from her land and livelihood because she wanted to vote. Yet Mrs. Hamer was more than what this state could inflict on her. She was the embodiment of what was possible. She was the spirit that anchored us and the voice we needed. And one day that voice would shake the country.

My heart was still in voter registration but there was so much more work to be done. White folks in Mississippi had dismantled Black representation that the state saw in Reconstruction, decimating the Black voting populace, adding poll taxes and literacy tests to the cocktail of voter suppression. By the 1960s, Mississippi only had two thousand Black voters, down from almost two hundred thousand during Reconstruction.

There was also unbearable poverty in rural Mississippi, and ransacked, bare-bones schools where kids had no chance at learning. How could we imagine a world where Black people could register to vote if they couldn’t even feed their families? The more ambitious I was about helping the people in Mississippi, the more I learned just how much of an uphill battle I was facing. I was the only CORE pers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Prologue: Us
• I. Dillard
• II. Jail
• III. Dads and Fathers
• IV. Freedom Rides
• V. God and Fear
• VI. Shreveport
• VII. American Terrorism
• VIII. Baton Rouge
• IX. War in Mississippi
• X. Marvin, Mattie, and Medgar
• XI. A Weekend in Jackson
• XII. Missing
• XIII. Vote
• XIV. James, Mickey, and Andrew
• XV. Search
• XVI. Even in Harlem
• XVII. The Eulogy
• XVIII. Democracy
• Epilogue: Us Redux
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Copyright
• About the Publisher