Biography
David J. Dennis Sr., a CORE leader, was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, on May 24, 1961, for participating in the Freedom Rides and challenging segregation in interstate transportation — one of the arrests recorded by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and preserved in the Civil Rights Digital Library. The catalog establishes the arrest, the participation, and the individually identified police photograph, but not the court disposition, any transfer to Parchman, or the physical release date; those fields are unresolved pending county-jail, court, or penitentiary records.
He also joined the August 4, 1961 effort to desegregate the Shreveport Trailways terminal.
CORE questionnaire and separate jail episodes
The CORE questionnaire identifies him as David James Dennis and gives October 17, 1940 as his birth date, already recorded here. His handwritten first-jail recollection places that experience in New Orleans in November 1960; the accompanying typed notes likewise call November 1960 his first arrest and describe his first jail meal. The exact admission and discharge days are not supplied. The notes describe a separate sequence in 1961: a 30-day Orleans Parish Prison stay for picketing without a permit before the Freedom Ride, five days in Jackson following the ride from Montgomery, extradition back to Orleans Parish Prison, and two more days there before bond release. The prior 30-day stay may overlap the already recorded April 17 New Orleans case and is not added as a second duration without a firmer case link. The five-day Jackson recollection differs from the three-day interval in the currently recorded May 24–27 case; it does not independently establish replacement calendar endpoints. The post-extradition two-day Orleans stay is recorded separately, with its admission and release dates unknown rather than calculated from those conflicting Jackson dates. A later passage describes his surrender to Jackson police after the fall 1963 Freedom Vote on a contributing-to-the-delinquency-of-a-minor accusation, but supplies no completed jail-booking or discharge record. The questionnaire lists about twenty arrests and explicitly includes custody ending before booking or confinement; those entries are not all treated as additional jail terms.
