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A Father, a Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride
by David J. Dennis Jr.
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.
"A young Black activist revisits his father's role in the civil rights movement of the 1960s...Timely in an era of renewed disenfranchisement and an instructive, important addition to the literature of civil rights." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"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." - Library Journal (starred review)
"The heavy toll exacted by the fight against Jim Crow is tallied in this gripping memoir...This captures a remarkably intimate and vivid portrait of the human side of the civil rights movement." - Publishers Weekly
"The Movement Made Us takes literature to a momentous Southern Black space 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
"Captivating from the opening sentence, David J. Dennis, Jr., proves that he is not only a great writer, but he is also a great witness. In The Movement Made Us, Dennis, through a thoughtful and unsparing recalibration of history, captures all of the terrors of being Black in the United States, the diligence of our resistance work, the nuances of our existence, and the miracle of our survival. These are integral testimonies, these vivid, harrowing, and moving remembrances passed from ancestor to elder to son. The Movement Made Us is a stunning chronicle of defiance." - Robert Jones, Jr., author of The Prophets
"The Dennises' remarkable, beautifully written oral history and memoir sparks a long overdue reckoning. It is the most raw, intimate accounting and recounting of the civil rights era I've ever read. What was sacrificed? What was lost? What does trauma do to a body, a family? The Movement Made Us takes us to the intersections of history, memory, activism, and parenthood, where tenderness lives alongside the terror and violence of America's broken promises—yesterday's and today's. Here, we travel the emotional distance between a son's searching and a father's regrets to arrive ultimately, hopefully, to a healing place." - Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
This information about The Movement Made Us was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
David J. Dennis Jr. is a senior writer at The Undefeated. His work has been featured in Atlanta magazine, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, and Huffington Post, among other publications. Dennis is the recipient of the 2021 American Mosaic Journalism Prize, is a National Association of Black Journalist Salute to Excellence award winner, and was named one of The Root's 100 Most Influential African Americans of 2020. He lives in Georgia with his wife and two children and is a graduate of Davidson College.
David J. Dennis Sr. is a civil rights veteran and one of the original Freedom Riders who rode from Montgomery to Jackson in 1961. He served as field secretary for the Congress of Racial Equality in Louisiana and Mississippi (1961–65) and as co-director with Bob Moses of the Voter Education Committee of the Council of Federated Organizations. He helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and the challenge to the National Democratic Party in 1964. He attended Dillard University and earned his law degree at the University of Michigan. In 1972, he co-directed the challenge to the Louisiana Democratic structure that resulted in an African American chairman and a majority African American delegation being sent to the national convention, the first time since Reconstruction. He is the executive director of the Southern Initiative Algebra Project, Inc., a nonprofit organization that works to ensure a quality education for all children, especially children of color and the chronically underserved.
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