The Movement Made Us: How History is in the Present

“What book has had a profound impact on you?”

As a book lover, I get this question a lot. Over the years I have really struggled with the answer and have chosen to answer instead with the authors that have impacted me like Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck and H.P Lovecraft.

But that all changed a couple of years ago.

Stephen Curry had a book club with Literati that focused on underrepresented voices, and it is through this book club that I was introduced to the book The Movement Made Us: a Father, a Son and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride by David J Dennis Jr. and in collaboration with David J. Dennis Sr. Though I read this book a couple of years ago, I still think about it all the time.

Dennis Senior was a civil rights leader during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. His work mostly focused on rural areas in the South, mainly in Mississippi. The book dives deep into the horrors of what it was like being a civil rights leader at that time. Though I knew Civil Rights leaders endured horrors because of the color of their skin and for the fact that they were fighting to simply be treated as equal with others, this book really hit home on how much of a fight they had to endure. The book describes these leaders, and ordinary people, waging literal WAR in their hometowns. People were murdered for the beliefs of having the right to vote, being able to sit at a diner counter and be welcomed anywhere on a bus. Apparently, they were asking for too much.

Dennis Junior describes how Senior’s work in the Civil Rights Movement really affected himself and his family. Though the book doesn’t say it outright, I believe it is safe to assume that Senior suffered from some sort of PTSD. And how could he not? He saw family, friends and children get murdered for standing up and demanding to be treated with respect. After the formal part of the Civil Rights Movement had “ended” Senior experienced self-destructive habits and behaved in a way that is usually associated with survivor’s guilt. And not surprisingly Senior’s behaviors greatly affected those around him.

Since I have read The Movement Made Us I have not stopped thinking about it. I know many Civil Rights leaders, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and Malcom X, gave up their lives for the movement. But this book really touched my heart to the extent of what these leaders, and ordinary people, REALLY had to endure and how truly ugly it was. They were in a war for their rights in their backyard. I can’t imagine what that must have been like; to be treated as an enemy in your homeland.

And the pain and trauma doesn’t just end once the war is “over”- that trauma is with that person for the rest of their lives. It affects not only them but everyone around them. No one talks about that enough-the long-lasting effects of trauma, even for a worthy cause. I am grateful for Junior and Senior for being vulnerable and sharing with everyone their pain to better bring awareness.

Though we tend to think of the Civil Rights Movement as a thing of the past, this book also makes clear that the past is very much the present and the present influences the future. Today, still not all people in the United States are treated equally and people are still fighting and sacrificing their lives for the right to be treated equally.

Because quotes speak loudly to me, I have shared some quotes from The Movement Made Us to illustrate what these leaders had to ensure in the past, but these quotes also show how things are still the same in the present.

I not only encourage you to read The Movement Made Us by also reflect on how things are still the same today.

• “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 on The Movement Made Us)
• “The years that more resembled those of a solider returning from Vietnam (than) that a hero of American democracy”
• “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”
• “I knew that speaking up would get me and my family killed”
• “Doctors and nurses avoiding eye contact with us as they told us they couldn’t close the wounds on men and women who were fighting for equality”
• “I would become acquainted with bombs plenty of times over the next few years, to the point that they just became part of the hazard of being Black in the South”
• “Bombs didn’t just take lives, but seen as a tactic of intimidation and death in the 1960s made all of it feel more like war than activism”
• “We had to understand that dying was as sure as the first bead of sweat on a Mississippi afternoon. And yet we march toward it”
• “But I know why I charged. I charged so that the people behind me, those that would follow, could have clearer paths to their freedoms”
• “… armed police guarding businesses and clubs they felt were less expendable than Black humans”
• “The Movement lived in backwoods and shadows, where resisting was the most deadly thing you could do”
• “This was a terrorist attack on a Black church in America. But it was more. It was a military-grade tactic to smoke out innocent men and get them killed. It was planned with precision and executive like a war mission”
• “We live in a country that has never stopped terrorizing”
• “Nothing is going to happen to those white boys who killed them… you know that already”
• “The Harlem Riots were called such because of the Black upraising; but as has always been the case, it was the police doing the rioting”
• “Every day America was showing me how ruthless a country it could be”
• “Because I feel that a hundred years ago, if the proper thing had been done by the federal government… we wouldn’t be here today to mourn the death of a brave young man like James Chaney”
• “America had notarized white terror as being worthy of the most powerful office in the land”
• “That once this country saw white victims of white supremacy, it would see the error in its violence and change”
• “And as soon as we were able to utilize that law to meet our needs, it stopped becoming the law of the land”
• “The men who pulled guns on him and killed his friends may not have been thinking abut my father’s descendants, but they didn’t have to. Their terror rattled loose the leaves of our family trees”