[ History books have called my father an activist, a community
organizer, a freedom fighter, among other things. But they don’t use
a phrase that my dad has used to describe himself: a war general.]
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CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVISTS FOUGHT FOR AMERICA’S DEMOCRACY. THEY SHOULD
BE HONORED AS VETERANS  
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David Dennis Jr.
June 11, 2022
New York Times
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_ History books have called my father an activist, a community
organizer, a freedom fighter, among other things. But they don’t use
a phrase that my dad has used to describe himself: a war general. _

A Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders was firebombed by white
supremacists in 1961 near Anniston, Ala., Credit: United Press
International, via High Museum of Art // New York Times

 

David Dennis Sr. was on the original Freedom Ride bus from Montgomery,
Ala., to Jackson, Miss., in 1961. He was a field secretary for the
Congress of Racial Equality in Mississippi and a prime architect of
the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964.

As a leader in the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, my dad
was an officer in a war that effectively installed democracy in a
country that was violently resistant to it. He and his peers suffered
terrible losses and pain that they continue to experience effects
from. For that reason, the veterans of the civil rights movement
should be treated as the war heroes they are — not just in
celebrations or praise but in tangible policy. The best way to start
is to provide these veterans with Veterans Affairs benefits.

This may sound like hyperbolic or dramatic rhetoric. It’s not. The
war they fought was literal. My dad was in a church in Shreveport,
La., when it was bombed. He went to meetings attended by spies who
delivered intelligence to government agencies. He was beaten. He was
imprisoned. His friends were tortured. Some of his friends — Medgar
Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner among them
— were assassinated.

 

During the violent summer of 1964, my dad had a job of sending field
workers out to the most dangerous backwoods communities of
Mississippi, where murder and other violence could be carried out
under the cover of night. On one such occasion, my dad sent workers to
Natchez to gather affidavits from people who said their voting rights
had been infringed upon. While the men were there, they were attacked
by Klansmen, their car shot up in the process.

When they returned to Jackson and told my dad what happened, he
recalls, he simply looked at them and asked if they had the
affidavits. The men, incredulous, told my dad that they had not gotten
the affidavits. Of course they hadn’t. They had been shot at and had
fled for their lives. My dad tossed some car keys on the table and
told them to go back and get the affidavits.

Like a war general, he sent them back onto the battlefield to complete
their mission, knowing death was a real possibility. That coldness he
developed by necessity would last decades.

When my dad was in law school at the University of Michigan in the
late 1960s and early ’70s, a school psychologist told him that he
was experiencing some of the same symptoms that he’d seen in people
who had returned from the war in Vietnam. I saw these symptoms over
the years: Slight noises would wake him up at night. He had night
terrors and memories he’d repressed for decades, emerging only when
he would reminisce about the movement with other veterans or, more
recently, when I’d press him for details while working on our book.
Even now, at 81, he still experiences these aftereffects.

My dad isn’t alone. A friend of his from the movement who was shot
in the early 1960s would hide under his bed when fireworks went off.
He has friends who fell into addiction and depression. Some of his
friends still can’t bear to talk about what they survived.

 

All of this suffering wasn’t for naught, of course. America was not
a functioning democracy before the campaign my father and his fellow
activists fought. In Mississippi, for instance, only 6.7 percent of
eligible Black voters
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vote in 1964. So workers all across the state of Mississippi
organized, fought and strategized to bring about what would become the
Voting Rights Act of 1965, enforcing the 15th Amendment right to vote.
This is when America became a true democracy.

I have spent my entire life hearing about righteous American wars, how
we sent troops to other countries to fight to restore, preserve or
install democracy. The troops who risked their lives to fight these
wars, some of whom came back injured physically or mentally, are
entitled to certain rights and benefits, including disability
compensation, medical and educational benefits, housing assistance,
burial allowances, counseling and sometimes pensions. While the
Veterans Affairs benefits come with their own sets of problems and
shortcomings that need to be addressed, at least they’re a start.

My dad and other activists like him have no such benefits. Many also
have gone for decades without adequate health care — which speaks to
the larger missing safety net that leaves far too many Americans
unprotected. I’ve seen so many of my dad’s friends limp to old
age because they never got their broken hips or torn ligaments or
cracked bones fixed after they were beaten in the 1960s. I’ve also
had to watch my dad and his friends pool together money to bury their
friends who died in poverty. Imagine how many civil rights veterans
could benefit from mental health support. They all deserve better.

It’s also important to note that there are precedents for benefits
being extended to veterans of liberation movements in other places
around the world. In India, for example, “freedom fighters” who
resisted British rule before the country’s independence in 1947 are
entitled to
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care, pensions and railway passes. Anti-apartheid soldiers in South
Africa were promised similar benefits
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have fought to make the country
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its promise.

The first question I get when I broach this topic is: How do we
determine who gets the resources? The easiest way is to use the names
of people who were on the payrolls and meeting minutes for civil
rights organizations such as the Congress of Racial Equality, the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People in the 1960s. But that doesn’t
encompass all the people who need these benefits — a shrinking group
of Americans, mostly Black but some not, now in their 70s or older.

For a more comprehensive list of the people who made the movement, we
should look to voter registration lists of the era from across the
South. Just trying to register to vote as a Black person in the Jim
Crow South was an act of defiance. Most who tried were denied,
and many faced violence and threats
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In 1963 in Mississippi, 83,000 of those mostly disenfranchised voters
voted in an alternative election known as the Mississippi Freedom
Vote [[link removed]]. It
helped prove that voter suppression in the South was creating
illegitimate elections and demonstrated what a free and fair election
could look like. All of the brave citizens who submitted ballots —
many of whom also housed volunteers, kept freedom fighters safe and
made invaluable contributions to the movement — should be among the
first to get V.A. benefits for their service to our nation’s
democracy.

My father and his peers fought a vital battle in the war for freedom
that is still being waged. As the movement continues to seek justice
amid attacks on civil rights and voting rights, and the racially
motivated killings of Black Americans in Buffalo
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elsewhere, we should also look back at how we can aid the veterans
from earlier eras of this struggle who are still with us.

And as we consider what kind of reparations and redress are necessary,
granting those veterans the government benefits that other war heroes
are entitled to would be one small, important step in the right
direction.

_[David Dennis Jr. (@DavidDTSS [[link removed]]) is a
journalist and a co-author, with his father, of “The Movement Made
Us
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A Father, a Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride.”]_

* civil rights movement
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* freedom fighter
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* Civil Rights
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* voting rights
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* African Americans
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* South
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* Racism
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* KKK
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* Ku Klux Klan
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* 1960s
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* U.S. history
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* Veterans
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* democracy
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