THE MOVEMENT MADE US

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.