(*81*) Ann Ladner, Mississippi civil rights activist, dies at 81

(*81*) Ann Ladner, a longtime fighter for freedom and equality in her home state of Mississippi who supported the NAACP, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and voter registration organizations, has died, her family confirmed.

“My beloved sister Dorie Ladner passed away peacefully on Monday, March 11, 2024.” – wrote her younger sister Joyce Ladner on Facebook. “She will always be my older sister who fought fiercely to defend the weak and the dispossessed. She leaves behind a profound legacy of service.”

(*81*) Ladner was 81 years old.

In a telephone interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday, Joyce Ladner said she and her sister were born 15 months apart and grew up in Palmer’s Crossing, a community south of Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

“My sister was extraordinary. She was a very strong, tough person and very brave,” said Joyce Ladner, former interim president of Howard University.

She recalled that one example of this courage occurred after they were about 12 years old and went to the shop to purchase donuts.

“The white cashier came up behind Dorie and slapped her on the butt. She turned around and hit him in the head with those donuts,” Joyce Ladner said with amusing.

“We were scared, but you know that feeling when you know you did the right thing? It defeated us,” she said.

(*81*) Ladner and her sister then helped organize the Hattiesburg Branch of the NAACP Youth Council. While attending Jackson State College in Jackson, Mississippi, they continued to reveal against the state’s segregation policies. They were each eventually expelled from school for these actions, but in the autumn of 1961 they each enrolled at Tougaloo College, where they became lively members of the Student Peace Coordinating Committee.

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“SNCC was the green beret of the civil rights movement,” said Joyce Ladner. “She dropped out of faculty 3 times to work full-time at SNCC. She was an especially strong advocate for black rights. She told me, “I can’t learn when our people are suffering.”

(*81*) Ladner was one among the primary employees to go to Natchez, Mississippi, in 1964 to assist people register to vote, her sister said. The experience was at times shocking, given the increased activity of the Ku Klux Klan.

“Often the phone would ring at 3 a.m., which was never a good sign,” she said. “The person on the other end of the line would say, ‘Dorie, you all have two choices. You can stay there and we will burn you and the house, or you can go outside and we will shoot you. This kind of stress would be unbearable for almost anyone, and yet it remains.”

Ladner said one among the people her sister helped register to vote was Fannie Lou Hamer, who often said that her experience and involvement with SNCC helped her discover a voice for freedom. She also knew other civil rights luminaries akin to NAACP state field representative Medgar Evers, who was assassinated in 1963; Hattiesburg NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer and Clyde Kennard, one other NAACP leader who attempted to integrate the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg.

(*81*) Ladner was the lead organizer of Mississippi Freedom Summer, a volunteer campaign launched in June 1964 to register as many African American voters as possible in Mississippi. Joyce Ladner said she also participated in all the key civil rights protests from 1963 to 1968, including the March on Washington and the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

(*81*) Ladner died in Washington, D.C., where she had called home since 1974, her sister said.

“She became a social worker and worked in the emergency room at DC General Hospital for 28 years,” she said. “It was an extension of her organizing and fighting for people, helping people in times of crisis.”

In addition to Ladner, (*81*) Ladner’s survivors also included her daughter Yodit Churnet and a 13-year-old grandson “with whom she was in love,” Ladner said.

A memorial service is underway.