Dorie Ladner, dauntless civil rights activist, dies at 81
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Dorie Ladner, dauntless civil rights activist, dies at 81 (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
Story by Emily Langer
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, Ms. 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.”
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/dorie-ladner-dauntless-civil-rights-activist-dies-at-81/ar-BB1jQCy0
R.I.P.
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