“Champions” features current and historic figures who can inspire the struggle for a worker – and climate – safe world.
In Memoriam
Dorie Ladner, lifelong civil rights activist and a mentor to both LNS Co-Executive Director Joshua Dedmond and LNS Development Manager Yasmin Gabriel, died March 11 at 81.
Dorie was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and grew up in the nearby Black community of Palmers Crossing. Enraged by the racism she experienced and observed, Dorie became a civil rights activist at an early age. She and her sister Joyce Ladner joined a youth chapter of the NAACP in Hattiesburg when they were in high school. In her freshman year at Jackson State College she was expelled for supporting the Tougaloo Nine, students who were attempting to desegregate the public library in Jackson. The next year she was arrested for attempting to desegregate a Woolworth’s lunch counter. That same year she worked with SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) to register disenfranchised black voters and end racial segregation in public accommodations. She was a key organizer in SNCC’s Mississippi Freedom Summer.
Until her death in 2024, she continued organizing as a social and political activist against U.S. wars of aggression and was actively engaged in mobilization for a just U.S. policy in the Middle East. Ladner traveled across the country speaking about the people’s history of the Civil Rights Movement and contemporary social justice issues.
Her work in the civil rights movement, she said, gave her “an ability to see injustices, and to want to deal with them in the workplace, politically, in your apartment building, on your street, wherever you are.”
For more on Dorie Ladner: https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/ladner-dorie/
For Dorie Ladner’s obituary: https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/03/13/dorie-ladner-civil-rights-dead/