Dorie Ladner, a passionate intellectual from Mississippi who became one of the most ferocious activists in the civil rights movement, died in Washington, D.C., on March 11. She was 81. 

The late Ladner was a leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who dropped out of college in the 1960s to become a foot soldier on the front lines of many struggles. 

Her sister, Joyce Ladner, said the late activist always had a freedom-fighting spirit.

“I have been with her for 80 years. She was my protector.  She didn’t let anybody come near me on the playground or she would beat the boys up,” Joyce Ladner told The Informer. “She felt that her life’s calling was to do civil rights work and to get Black people empowered.” 

Born on June 28, 1942, the late activist joined a youth chapter of the NAACP, where Clyde Kennard served as an adviser. She later got involved in the civil rights movement after learning about the murder of Emmett Till. 

After graduating from Earl Travillion High School as salutatorian, she and her sister enrolled at Jackson State University. 

Both Joyce and Dorie attended state NAACP meetings with Medgar Evers and Eileen Beard. 

That same year, they were expelled from Jackson State for participating in sit-ins and protests.

In 1961, she enrolled at Tougaloo College where she became engaged with the Freedom Riders. During the early 1960s, racial hostilities in the South caused Ladner to drop out of school three times to join the SNCC. 

In  1962, she was arrested along with Charles Bracey, a Tougaloo College student, for attempting to integrate the Woolworth’s lunch counter. 

Ladner joined with SNCC Project Director Robert Moses and others from SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to register Black voters and integrate public housing in the area.

Ladner’s sister reflected on the challenges in fighting for the right to vote.

“To get to vote. That was so hard,” Joyce Ladner said. “For example, I tried to register to vote three times and flunked the literacy test.”

D.C. Becomes Home to Freedom Fighters, Ladner Leaves Lasting Legacy

When activist Lawrence Guyot died in 2012, Ladner remembered the time when her comrade was bloodied and released from jail.

“His face looked like a piece of raw steak,” she told The Washington Post in a November 2012 article. “He was convinced that they were going to kill him, but Medgar Evers had been killed that night, and they let him and four women go.”

Following the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, Ladner and Guyot would be among a generation of activists who migrated to the Washington, D.C. area and worked in the nation’s capital to continue the freedom fight.

“I mourn the loss of my friend Dorie Ladner, who I lived and worked with to register voters in Mississippi in 1963,” D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton said in a tweet after her death. 

Norton, a native Washingtonian recalled:  “The work was dangerous, and I gathered courage from Dorie. She was fearless at a time when being Black in MS meant risking your life.”

Smith said Ladner “was a beautiful spirit.” 

“She was serious as a heart attack about the civil rights movement but she always brought joy into our lives when she came into the room,” remembered Smith, who was also in SNCC and represented Ward 1 on the D.C. Council.

Chuck Hicks, another civil rights activist from Louisiana, said, “Dorie Ladner’s life was about freedom and justice for all. She was also an intellectual.”

This article originally appeared in the Washington Informer