Dave Dennis (activist)

David J. Dennis is a civil rights activist active in the movement since the 1960s. He grew up in the segregated area of Omega, Louisiana, and worked as co-director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), as director of Mississippi's Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and as one of the organizers of the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. Dave Dennis worked closely with both Bob Moses and Medgar Evers as well as members of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Dennis' first involvement in the Civil Rights Movement was at a Woolworth sit-in organized by CORE and he went on to become a Freedom Rider in 1961. More recently Dennis has put his activism toward a new project, the Algebra Project, which is a nonprofit organization run by Bob Moses that aims to improve the mathematics education for minority children. Dennis also speaks about his experiences in the movement through an organization called Dave Dennis Connections.

Dave Dennis was born in 1940 on a plantation of a sharecropper in Omega, Louisiana. All he knew was a life of segregation, he says in one interview with Ebony magazine, "I grew up in this life where you had to stay in your place" (Ugwuomo). Dennis grew up extremely poor, in the Shreveport area where he lived people didn't have even the most basic utilities. He didn't know what it was like to have these basic utilities until he was nine years old. Even after Dennis' family moved to the inner city of Louisiana, black citizens including his family were "only able to get basic utilities by entering white territory." He was the first of his family to graduate from high school. He graduated from Southern High School which was connected to Southern University where the beginnings of student protests were forming. Dennis during this time in his life wasn't interested in being a part of any protests or demonstrations, he says, "I didn’t have this interest in civil rights that you might think most people are born with". He didn't want any part of the civil rights activism, "Things were happening [in the country] and I was trying to run from them”.

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