Reflections from the Annual MLK Symposium Commemorative Event on Jan. 19, 2026
This year marked the 40th anniversary of U-M’s MLK Symposium, a milestone dedicated not only to remembrance but to reckoning. Together with the history department, DAAS hosted an event titled “The Movement Made Us All: Historical Legacies of the Civil Rights Movement and the Current Moment,” which brought together generations of listeners for a conversation with father-and-son guest speakers David Dennis Sr. (U-M Law ’71), a civil rights movement veteran, and David Dennis Jr., an award-winning journalist and author. The two also co-authored the book The Movement Made Us: A Father, a Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride.
Moderated by Matthew Countryman, associate professor of history and Afroamerican and African studies, the evening’s discussion wove together history, memory, trauma, and hope into a deeply personal reflection on what the civil rights movement was and what it still demands of us.
Movement? More like a WAR.
For Dennis Jr., the decision to write a book about his father started with a childhood fascination that grew into a sense of moral responsibility. As a kid, his father’s stories of high-speed chases, spies, and narrow escapes felt like comic book adventures. As an adult, he realized they were stories of a war for equality.
Dennis Jr. began writing the book in 2016, at a moment when the country felt politically volatile and fractured. He wanted to offer something hopeful — not a naive hope, but a hope rooted in examples of those who had faced overwhelming odds and persevered. Structured partly through letters to his father, the book is both a historical account and a meditation on inheritance: what it meant to be the child of someone who never got to leave the battlefield.
As Dennis Jr. put it, for the veterans of the civil rights movement, there was no “post” in PTSD. The danger was not over when the marches ended, and the next generation was born into the same struggle. The trauma did not end; it evolved. Dennis Jr. described the book as a victory because it documents the lives of people who chose to love each other by fighting for their survival. He stressed the need to redefine power and wealth away from individuals and toward the community. Rebuild our “third spaces,” and our organizing and political imagination will grow.
From Plantation to Protest
The elder Dennis’ journey did not begin with political ambitions or protests. For the first nine years of his life, he picked cotton on a plantation (a similar story to many his age). His dream was simple: go to college, become an engineer, make money, and “never go back to that plantation.”
He didn’t initially want to join the movement, heeding his mother’s advice: keep your head down, get an education, and get out. But while attending Dillard University, he went to his first civil rights meeting with a woman he had hoped to take to dinner. Dennis Sr. recalls palpable fear at a meeting the night before the freedom rides. He realized, “There's not enough space in this room for both God and fear,” and volunteered on the spot to take part in the rides.
Dennis Sr., who served as the Southern regional director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) from 1962–1965, emphasized that the civil rights movement was more than just marches and sit-ins; it was a strategic, layered organization. Direct action mattered, but so did political infrastructure. Working with figures like Bob Moses and Medgar Evers, Dennis helped build voter registration campaigns across Mississippi and form coalitions that would become COFO (the Council of Federated Organizations). They brought together grassroots leaders, teachers, sharecroppers, and groups like the Deacons for Defense and Justice. This was not a top-down movement; it was community built.
He stressed that protest alone was not enough. You have to challenge the structure of power — who owns the businesses, who runs the government, and who controls the vote.
The Weight of Action
The emotional core of the talk came when Dennis Sr. spoke about loss. During Freedom Summer, Black activists were targeted with coordinated acts of terror. He still carries the heavy memories of friends murdered and attacked, psychologically broken after torture, or simply disappeared and never seen again. He spoke of feeling the lifelong responsibility for the people he assigned to dangerous work, who never came back.
“It was a war,” he said, heartbroken. “I was 23 years old. You never forget.”
For Dennis Sr., MLK Day is not simply about remembrance, but recommitment. He worries that the day has become symbolic rather than transformative. Like New Year’s Day, he said, it should mark a reset — a renewed pledge to act in love and justice.
He offered a metaphor from childhood: when one kid starts shooting hoops, others will come to join.
“Do something,” he urged students, “and you’ll be surprised how many people come.” Movements do not begin with crowds; crowds gather around movements.
“Listen to Your Children”
As the event closed, Dennis Sr. reflected on fatherhood with humility. He admitted he had not always been the father he wished he could be, shaped as he was by constant danger and grief. When asked, was it worth it?
He responded with a smile, “Was it worth it? It was worth every doggone thing that I did.”
Of the 21 people he started his civil rights journey with, only two are still alive. Dennis Sr. will be 86 this year. His final message was simple and forward-looking: listen to your children. Because the Movement did not end. It made us all — and it is still making us.
