Civil rights leader Ernest McMillan’s legacy lives on in South Dallas

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Last week South Dallas lost a beloved son, Ernest McMillan.

According to a Dallas Weekly post McMillan “challenged systems, uplifted voices, and reminded us all of the power we hold when we stand in purpose. His contributions to Dallas — and beyond — are etched into the fabric of our community.”

D’s Bethany Erickson followed with a tribute that hearkened back to a story the magazine published in 2019 about McMillan’s tireless lifelong fight for justice.

“When would you have stopped?” wrote the late Zac Crain, clearly awed by McMillan’s decades-long perseverance. “When you came home from Georgia and Alabama in the ’60s with post-traumatic stress disorder-like symptoms because you half-expected to disappear every day for two years, to wind up at the end of a rope or buried in an earthen dam? When you couldn’t leave your mother’s house, couldn’t even get out of bed, for three months? 

“When you were forced to run to Canada, then France, then various African countries, then Cincinnati, of all places? When you lost three years of your life to prison, all over a broken bottle of milk, just because you wanted something better for your people?”

Three years ago when McMillan published his book, “Standing: One Man’s Odyssey through the Turbulent ’60s,” he was kind enough to let Dallas Free Press publish an excerpt. The passage focused on a specific incident in the ’60s, when the South Dallas-based Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) received word that a young Black boy was being arrested for stealing candy from a white-owned convenience store.

McMillan wrote that SNCC often viewed its work as a “makeshift, spur-of-the-moment classroom” for the community. On this particular evening, SNCC was “in our educating mode among our neighbors,” McMillan wrote. “We began to call out to all that if this store were ours, this never would have happened.

“We reminded onlookers that our people know how to treat each other with respect, but the outsiders who owned our land and controlled our economies were in South Dallas only to take our money and run.”

At least 50 years after that incident, Crain wrote of McMillan that “he’s seen how things have changed and how they haven’t, and that’s why he is still putting in the work.”

The civil rights activist was hopeful at the time. McMillan told Crain he saw “people from different parts of Dallas coming together, from the north side to the southern sector to West Dallas, coming together and figuring up ways we can combine and be more cooperative with our own — putting our egos in our back pockets and working together for the whole. Being greater than all of the parts.” 

“I’m excited about it,” McMillan said. “I don’t know if I personally can continue.”

In its post announcing McMillan’s death, the Weekly recognized “the responsibility to continue the work. To speak boldly. To organize intentionally. To honor the path Ernest McMillan helped pave.”

At the Sixth Floor Museum during his 2024 book tour, McMillan read a poem from his companion book to “Standing” — “Kneeling: Poems and Verses Transcending the Turbulent ‘60s.” 

Titled, “Let’s Go Forward Together,” the poem repeatedly implores his audiences to “Ceaselessly delve. Search. Dig. Move. Ask. Rip. Tear. Reach. Plunge. Go. Question. Push. Drive.”

And at the end of it all, McMillan instructs: “Rise. Soar.”