Historically, rituals commemorating the dead have also served as calls to political action. While political funerals are a powerful phenomenon worldwide, this post describes two forms they have taken in the United States, highlighting continuities and frictions in their relationship to American funeral cultures.
Funeral services as political organizing
On August 7, 1964, Dave Dennis stood up to give the eulogy for fellow civil rights worker, James Chaney. He had been asked to soothe the mourners. Instead, Dennis gave a fiery speech. “I’m not gonna stand here and ask anybody in here not to be angry tonight,” he proclaimed.
Members of the Ku Klux Klan had tortured and executed Chaney, a Black resident of Meridian, Mississippi, alongside his white colleagues Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. The three young men had been investigating the burning of a Black church on behalf of the civil rights organization, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).
Dennis, the leader of the Mississippi operations of CORE, was all too familiar with racial violence. “I’m sick and tired of going to funerals! I’ve got a bitter vengeance in my heart tonight!” Dennis shouted.
Instead of recounting Chaney’s well-known life in the community, in his eulogy he railed about the beating and murder of Black people across the South and the persistent lack of justice following these crimes. Even well-known perpetrators escaped punishment as white police, jailors, and juries colluded to ensure they walked free.
Dennis connected his grief and anger to broader political forces. “I not only blame the people who pulled the trigger or did the beating or dug the hole with the shovel…but I blame the people in Washington, DC,” he said.
In the wake of federally sanctioned horrors, unwilling eulogists like Dennis urged everyone in the audience to harness their anger to register to vote, talk to neighbors and relatives, and become leaders in their communities. “Don’t just look at me and the people here and go back and say that you’ve been to a nice service, a lot of people came…Your work is just beginning,” he thundered.
Dennis’s call to action echoed a long tradition of Black funerals, known as homegoings, that emerged out of slavery. These services often served the dual purpose of memorializing the dead and galvanizing political activism to protect the living, underscoring the relations between the living and the dead.
Protest funerals during the civil rights movement, like James Chaney’s, Medgar Evers’, and Emmett Till’s, continued to sustain the community while critiquing the conditions that normalized the association of Black life with early death. The growth of television in this era heightened viewers’ sense of intimacy and shared experience across the nation. Highly publicized funerals, like Chaney’s, served as platforms for gathering new allies for racial justice.
Political Action as Funeral Service
In 1991, artist and HIV/AIDS activist, David Wojnarowicz published his memoir, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. Wojnarowicz blamed government for “slow murder”: inaction and ineffectiveness facing the AIDS epidemic, and he raged at the numbness he sensed toward the memorialization of those who had died of AIDS.
“I worry that friends will slowly become professional pallbearers, waiting for each death, of their lovers, friends and neighbors, and polishing their funeral speeches; perfecting their rituals of death rather than a relatively simple ritual of life such as screaming in the streets,” he wrote.
Instead, Wojnarowicz imagined breaking the familiar pattern of the funeral service and forcing public recognition of private grief. In 1988, at a protest calling for greater access to experimental drug treatment for AIDS, he had worn a denim jacket with the words, “If I die of AIDS—forget burial—just drop my body on the steps of the FDA,” printed on the back alongside a pink triangle. In his memoir, too, he suggested using the bodies of those who died of AIDS in political activism.
When Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992, a subgroup of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) called the Marys enacted Wojnarowicz’s idea. The first of several ACT UP political funerals was conducted on July 29, 1992. Mourners carrying banners and a somber drumline marched ahead of Wojnarowicz’s coffin through the East Village in New York City. After a recitation of a passage from Wojnarowicz’s memoir, mourners screamed in the street. His partner, Tom Rauffenbart, later scattered Wojnarowicz’s ashes on the White House lawn as part of ACT UP’s second Ashes Action in October 1996.
Like many ACT UP actions, the political funerals that members organized were visually striking and emotionally provocative. Parading a coffin in the streets and dumping ashes on the White House lawn subverted white Protestant norms that dictated public stoicism in the face of individual loss and a narrow cultural place for human remains. Political funerals enabled ACT UP activists to counter the dehumanization of people with HIV/AIDS and force wider recognition of the messy, embodied individuality of the dead while simultaneously inviting mass grief.
These two types of political funerals—funeral services that urged greater political activism, and political actions that adapted funeral rituals—share similarities and are hardly the only political uses of the dead. Nevertheless, they stand as potent reminders of how activists like Dave Dennis and David Wojnarowicz linked grief and rage across different cultural contexts to urgently condemn government neglect.
Protest funerals demonstrate powerful allyship between the dead and the disenfranchised. They remind us that people with marginalized identities have been forced to use every means available—even rethinking even the most sacred rituals of care for the dead—to demand recognition of their basic rights and humanity.
