SHREVEPORT – Before Civil Rights activist Dave Dennis participated and then helped plan Mississippi’s famous Summer of Freedom in 1964, the Shreveport native learned from local elders that spurred the movement overall.
Dennis will speak at LSUS on Friday, highlighting his role in the Shreveport Civil Rights Movement and what impact his hometown had in the foundation of the movement.
The 6 p.m. event will be in the LSUS Science Lecture Auditorium and is free and open to the public.
“Dave Dennis is a national treasure with a great story,” said LSUS history professor Dr. Gary Joiner. “He learned how to organize from Shreveport’s C.O. Simpkins, one of the mountaintops of the movement.
“Dave was a fly on the wall of perhaps the most pivotal time in the Shreveport Civil Rights Movement. When you talk about younger people in the movement, Dave Dennis is way up there in terms of importance.”
Dennis, who was arrested 30 times in relation to the Civil Rights Movement, was an integral part of the college student and young people movement.
A Dilliard University student who initially had no plans to join the Civil Rights Movement, he participated in a 1960 sit-in at a Woolworth’s department store in New Orleans – which was the first organized demonstration in Louisiana’s largest city.
Dennis joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and worked with a number of student groups and overarching civil rights groups throughout the movement.
Shreveport played an earlier role in the Civil Rights Movement with leaders like Simpkins and the involvement of Ella Baker, the “theoretician” of the movement who frequented Shreveport often for weeks at a time and was credited with separating and guiding the student movement to be more action-oriented than their elders.
Dennis played a key role in the integration of the Louisiana State Fair in 1961.
“Dave Dennis was the lone CORE field secretary in the area in 1961, and the Fair doesn’t’ get integrated without him," said LSUS graduate student Mikal Barnes, a researcher on Joiner’s Civil Rights Heritage Trail project in Caddo Parish. “Simpkins would organize a fake protest because he knew there were informants in his meetings.
“Dennis and others spread the rumor throughout the community, and the entire police force shows up expecting a riot. Businesses don’t want to get tarnished during a Fair riot, so they don’t show up either, and the Fair loses a lot of money. They lose so much money that they integrated the Fair.”
Joiner added that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a recorded statement to his lieutenants in Alabama that said he wanted to implement strategies used in Shreveport.
“Shreveport was not an also-ran in the Civil Rights Movement,” Joiner said. “Shreveport was at the forefront and was a forerunner of the movement.
“We believe that the first time ‘We Shall Overcome’ was sung in a church setting, not a formal setting, was at Little Union Baptist Church in October of 1960.”
While Dennis will highlight his Shreveport involvement, he is best known for his Mississippi voter registration efforts and his Freedom Ride efforts in Mississippi and Alabama.
He was a key planner of the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964 as a co-director of the Council of Federated Organizations, a coalition of groups like CORE, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The Freedom Summer was a voter registration drive that deployed black and white citizens from across the country to increase registration but also to pressure the Mississippi government to recognize African-American voting rights.
Violent backlashes came from groups like the Ku Klux Klan, who killed James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in a planned ambush with the help of a Neshoba County sheriff.
Dave Dennis was supposed to be in that car, but he fell ill and traveled back to Shreveport.
Those murders were detailed in the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning” starring Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe.
Joiner said Dennis’ visit is particularly important because the country is losing civil rights leaders both nationally and locally.
“Opportunities like these are golden, irreplaceable,” Joiner said. “One of our big emphases is to talk to these heroes and get their impressions, learn from them.
“You can’t help but admire his intelligence, honesty and demeanor. We’re so damn lucky that he wants to come here.”
Barnes added that Dennis makes a point to not have himself or other activists seen as “heroes.”
“He never wanted himself or the organizations he was with be painted as if they were heroes coming in to save a group of people who didn’t know how to save themselves,” Barnes said. “He always said the communities were a big piece of the movement and helped sustain the movement.”
