Civil rights activist Dorie Ann Ladner dies
Dorie Ann Ladner, a longtime fighter for freedom and equality in her home state of Mississippi with contributions to the NAACP, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and voter registration drives, has died, her family confirmed.
“My beloved sister, Dorie Ladner, died peacefully on Monday, March 11, 2024,” her younger sister, Joyce Ladner, wrote on Facebook. “She will always be my big sister who fought tenaciously for the underdog and the dispossessed. She left a profound legacy of service.”
Dorie Ladner was 81.
In a telephone interview Tuesday with The Associated Press, Joyce Ladner said she and her sister were born 15 months apart and grew up in Palmer’s Crossing, a community just south of Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
“My sister was extraordinary. She was a very strong and tough person and very courageous,” said Joyce Ladner, a former interim president of Howard University.
One example of that courage, she recalled, happened when they were about 12 years old and went to a store to buy donuts.
“The white cashier came up behind Dorie and hit her on the butt. She turned around and beat him over the head with those donuts,” Joyce Ladner said with a giggle.
“We were scared but you know how you have that feeling of knowing you had done the right thing? That’s what overcame us,” she said.
Dorie Ladner and her sister went on to help organize an NAACP Youth Council Chapter in Hattiesburg. When they attended Jackson State College in Jackson, Mississippi, they continued demonstrating against the segregation policies within the state. Those activities ultimately got both of them expelled from the school but in fall 1961, they both enrolled at Tougaloo College where they became active members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
“SNCC was the green beret of the civil rights movement,” Joyce Ladner said. “She dropped out of college three times to work full time with SNCC. She was extremely intense about the rights of Black people. She would tell me ‘I can’t study while our people are suffering.’ ”
Dorie Ladner was one of the first workers to go to Natchez, Mississippi in 1964, to help people register to vote, her sister said. The experience was harrowing at times, amid heightened Ku Klux Klan activity.
Ladner said one of the people her sister helped register to vote was Fannie Lou Hamer, who often said that experience and her involvement with SNCC helped her find her voice for freedom. She also knew other civil rights luminaries such as NAACP state field representative Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in 1963; Hattiesburg NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer and Clyde Kennard, another NAACP leader who had attempted to integrate the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg.