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I've got vengeance in my heart tonight and I ask you to be angry with me. Well, I m sick and tired. I am sick and tired of going to memorials. 1 am tired of funerals. I don't want to go to another memorial. . . Don't bow down anymore! We want our freedom NOW!
-Dave Dennis, "Eulogy of James E. Chaney"
On August 7, 1964, forty-seven days after the disappearance of Freedom Summer volunteers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner and three days after their murdered bodies were discovered buried fifteen feet below the Mississippi earth, CORE organizer Dave Dennis delivered the eulogy for slain activist James Chaney at his Mississippi funeral. Refusing to offer the "traditional" eulogy, one of lamentation and celebration of the deceased's life, Dennis instead offered one of the most impassioned and rhetorically masterful calls to engagement of the civil rights movement, the cadence of his voice ranging from moments of lament to jeremiad. He spoke of the "living dead," those in the community who are apathetic and sit idly by in the midst of oppression and gross injustice (2). The words cited above are particularly provocative in that Dennis questions what is the appropriate affective response to racism and injustice?
Dennis suggests a need to move beyond mourning to a more militant and radical affect, anger or rage, one that could translate into social change and transformation. "We want freedom now!" he declares. His insistence on this need for immediate action is what I call a radical ethic of rage. This insistence on the value of black life, the need to not only mourn the dead but also protect the living is black rage. Theorizing the relationship of mourning and rage is also the work of Alice Walker's civil rights novel Meridian, a novel that meditates on the efficacy of various political strategies for eradicating racial injustice in the civil rights movement.
As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, Walker's novel offers important insights on the activism and the vision of freedom but also on the extreme violence and sacrifices of lives in the movement. Importantly, the protagonist Meridian Hill's political awakening is ignited by news of the bombing of a local home where an interracial...