Remembering the life of civil rights activist Dorie Ladner

Civil rights activist Dorie Ladner, pictured at a Freedom Orientation in Ohio in June 1964, died on March 11 in Washington, D.C. She was 81. (Courtesy of SNCC Digital Gateway, Herbert Randall Freedom Summer Photographs, USM) & by& Hamil R. Harris & 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...