Dorie Ladner, civil rights activist, 81
Dorie Ladner, who joined the civil rights movement as a teenager in Mississippi, braving gunfire, tear gas, police dogs and Ku Klux Klansmen in an undaunted campaign for racial equality, died March 11 at a hospital in Washington. She was 81.
The cause was respiratory failure, said her sister Joyce Ladner, a constant companion in her activism and former interim president of Howard University.
Dorie Ladner was 11 months younger than Emmett Till, an African American who was 14 when he was lynched in the Mississippi Delta in 1955, his mutilated body tethered with barbed wire to a cotton gin fan and submerged in the Tallahatchie River.
For their entire lives, Ladner and her sister, her junior by a year, had endured the indignities of life as African Americans in the Jim Crow South — the rides in the back of the bus, the restrooms and drinking fountains for Black people only, the segregated schools, the secondhand textbooks passed down by White students.
But with Till’s death, “I was enraged, but I did not know what to do with that anger,” Dorie Ladner told an interviewer years later. “His murder made me aware of my Blackness.”
On the encouragement of activists including Vernon Dahmer Sr., a family friend and local NAACP leader who would later be killed in a KKK firebombing of his home, Dorie and Joyce Ladner joined a youth chapter of the NAACP in Hattiesburg, Miss., in 1959, when they were in high school.
As students at Tougaloo College, a historically Black school in Jackson, Miss., the Ladner sisters joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, widely known as SNCC, which became a principal organizer of the civil rights movement.
Having decided that she couldn’t stay in school and “know my people are suffering.” Dorie Ladner dropped out of Tougaloo and for much of the 1960s devoted herself full-time to her activism.
“The line was drawn in the sand for Blacks and for whites,” she said years later in an interview with PBS’s “American Experience.” “And was I going to stay on the other side of the line forever? No. I decided to cross that line. I jumped over that line and started fighting.”
At a time when Mississippi was one of the most dangerous places in the South for African Americans and civil rights workers, Ladner joined and led marches and sit-ins, mounted voter registration drives, and helped organize events including the 1963 March on Washington.
She traveled widely, encouraging Black people around the country to embrace their right to vote. She told one crowd in St. Louis that anyone who did not vote “should hang your head in shame,” explaining that in the South, “we have been shot at, beaten, cut and jailed for just trying to register to vote.”
“I gathered any courage I could from both Dorie and Joyce for being in Mississippi,” said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., who worked there alongside the sisters as an SNCC activist. “They were fearless at a time when it was often that you took your life in your own hands to be in that state. It was they who encouraged me to come, and who encouraged me while I was there.”
Ladner was arrested repeatedly for her activism, including for demonstrating at the funeral of Medgar Evers, the NAACP leader who was fatally shot outside his home in Jackson on June 12, 1963. Ladner was among the activists who had eaten dinner with him hours earlier.
Later that summer, she and her sister moved to New York City and worked with the SNCC office there to lay plans for the March on Washington, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech on Aug. 28, 1963.
Along with Norton, the sisters shared an apartment in New York, where folk singer Bob Dylan, one of the musicians who performed at the march, would often drop by and play his guitar.
Dorie Ann Ladner, one of nine children, was born in Hattiesburg on June 28, 1942, and grew up in the nearby Black community of Palmers Crossing, where she was raised by her mother, a homemaker, and her stepfather, a diesel mechanic.
Survivors include her husband of 52 years, Hailu Churnet, and their daughter, Yodit Churnet, both of Washington; four sisters; three brothers; and a grandson. Joyce Ladner, a professor of sociology, served as interim president at Howard from 1994 to 1995.
Despite the many gains of the civil rights movement, Ladner and her sister reflected with anguish on what they saw as the work that remained left to be done.
“When I saw that man strolling through the Capitol on January 6th, waving that oversized Confederate flag, I was not surprised,” Joyce Ladner told The Washington Post in 2021, referring to the attack on the U.S. Capitol that year by supporters of then-President Donald Trump.
“The war,” Dorie Ladner remarked, “is not over.”