Dorie Ladner, unheralded civil rights heroine, has died at 81

Dorie Ann Ladner, a largely unsung heroine on the frontlines of the civil rights movement in the 1960s South, a crusade that shamed the nation and abolished some of the last vestiges of legal segregation, died Monday in Washington. She was 81.

She died in a hospital of complications from Covid-19, bronchial obstruction and colitis, said her older sister and fellow civil rights activist Joyce Ladner, who called her a lifelong defender of “the underdog and the dispossessed.”

Born and raised in racially segregated Mississippi by a mother who taught her not to joke, Ms. Ladner joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as a teenager; left university three times to organize voter registration campaigns and promote integration; occasionally picked up a gun, as some of her prominent colleagues were shot or blown up; befriended the movement’s most celebrated figures; and participated in virtually every major civil rights march of the decade.

“The movement was something I wanted to do,” she said The Southern Quarterly in 2014. “It was pulling at me, pulling at me, so I followed my conscience.”

“The line was drawn in the sand for blacks and for whites,” she said in an interview for the PBS documentary series “American experiencethe same year. ‘And would I stay on the other side of the line forever? No. I decided to cross that line. I jumped over that line and started fighting.”

Dorie Ann Ladner was born June 28, 1942 in Hattiesburg, Miss. Her ancestors included Native Americans and, five generations earlier, a white landowner, but she identified as black. Her father, Eunice Ladner, was a dry cleaner whose marriage to her mother, Annie (Woullard) Ladner, ended in divorce when she was a toddler. Her mother, who managed the house, later married William Perryman, a mechanic.

Dorie participated in her first spontaneous protest when she was twelve: when a white grocery store clerk in her Palmers Crossing neighborhood inappropriately touched her buttocks, she hit him with a bag of donuts.

“Mother started training us not to let anyone abuse or mistreat us, and to always look white people in the eye when you talk to them,” Ms. Ladner recalled in the Southern Quarterly interview. “’Never look down, never look back.’”

Dorie and Joyce joined the NAACP in high school, and after graduating in the same class despite their age difference – with Joyce as salutatorian and Dorie as valedictorian – Dorie enrolled at what was then Jackson State College in Jackson, Miss. .

She was expelled after participating in a prayer vigil for students organizing a civil rights protest at Tougaloo College, which, like Jackson, is a historically black institution. The students had been arrested after staging a sit-in at the all-white public library in Jackson.

She later transferred to Tougaloo, where she quit three times to work as a civil rights organizer, but ultimately graduated in 1973 with a bachelor’s degree in history. After moving to Washington in 1974, she earned a master’s degree from Howard University’s School of Social Work and became an emergency room social worker at the District of Columbia General Hospital, which closed in 2001.

While at Tougaloo, she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, placing herself at the forefront of the civil rights movement. Prompted by the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, a black teenager barely a year older than she was at the time, she was also shocked by the murders of colleagues in the civil rights movement, including Medgar Evers and Vernon Dahmer.

“The murder of Emmett Till left a strong impression on me,” she said later in life. “I said, ‘If they did it to him, they’ll do it to me.'”

During her breaks in college, Ms. Ladner was serenaded by Bob Dylan at the New York apartment where she helped plan the 1963 March on Washington. He was said to be in love with her and had alluded to her in his song “Outlaw Blues”: I got a woman in Jackson / I’m not gonna say her name / She’s a brown-skinned woman, but I / love her just the same.

Ms. Ladner also has the Council of Federated Organizations, a network of civil rights groups; was arrested in Jackson for trying to integrate a Woolworth lunch counter; narrowly escaped a bomb accidentally placed next to where she was staying in Natchez while running an SNCC project; organized voter registration drives, including the Freedom Summer campaign in 1964, and worked with Fannie Lou Hamer, who was summarily evicted from her plantation home for registering; and was an organizer of the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the state’s all-white Democratic delegates to the party’s 1964 national convention.

In 1971 she married Hailu Churnet; their marriage ended in divorce. In addition to her sister Joyce, a professor of sociology who served as interim president of Howard University from 1994 to 1995, she is survived by her daughter, Yodit Churnet; another sister, Billie Collins; a brother, Harvey Garrett; two stepsisters, Willa Perryman Tate and Hazel Perryman Mimbs; two stepbrothers, Freddie and Archie Perryman; and a grandson. Another of her stepbrothers, Tommy Perryman, died before her.

Mr. Ladner often marveled that she was still a teenager when she convinced poor, vulnerable black people to risk their lives for principles she passionately proclaimed and believed they had an obligation to defend.

“I’ve been thinking a lot,” she said an interview with The HistoryMakers Digital Archive in 2008: “Would I follow a 19-year-old student myself?”

“But we had a message, and their ancestors had moved on, and we were the messengers who brought them the message that had been passed on that they were waiting for,” she added. “Spiritually, that’s the only way I can describe it. Because we had nothing but ourselves, and we lived in their houses and lived in community, and ate what they ate.

“We were poor ourselves,” Ms. Ladner said. “We had nothing. We didn’t have any big shiny cars, and we just had a message, and the message was one of liberation for all of us.”