Dorie and Joyce Ladner

Dorie and Joyce Ladner. . , Sisters Dorie and Joyce Ladner were community leaders during the civil rights movement. As teenagers, they joined the NAACP Youth Council and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and were mentored by civil rights leaders Vernon Dahmer, Clyde Kennard, and Medgar Evers. They were active throughout the Mississippi movement, participating in the Freedom Rides and Freedom Summer. They took part in major civil rights marches including the March on Washington in 1963 and the Selma to Montgomery March of 1965. , Side B , Dorie and Joyce Ladner grew up in rural Palmers Crossing, a Black community on the outskirts of Hattiesburg. The sisters learned about standing up for justice from their strong mother. Annie Ruth Perryman. In 1999, the sisters joined the Hattiesburg NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) Youth Council. Here they were mentored by Eileen Beard, Vernon Dahmer, Clyde Kennard, and a gentlemen known in the area simply as "Dr. McLeod,” and taken to statewide NAACP meetings., Following their mother's commitment to education, the sisters left for Jackson College (later Jackson State University) in 1960, the first in their family to attend college. There they attended NAACP meetings held by field secretary Medgar Evers. In 1961 the sisters were expelled from Jackson College for participating in a campus protest on behalf of the Tougaloo Nine. They enrolled at Tougaloo College and joined SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). They became Freedom Riders, and the following year Dorie started working on SNCC's voter registration projects in the Delta. She dropped out of Tougaloo to become an active SNCC field secretary, directing for three years the SNCC project in Natchez, where she faced frequent death threats. Joyce canvassed the state organizing voter registration drives. In August 1962, Dorie became a founding member of COFO (the Council of Federated Organizations) at the Mississippi Methodist Church in Clarksdale. Dorie was arrested three times that year, once after a sit-in at a Woolworth lunch counter in downtown Jackson. Joyce was arrested after attempting to worship at Jackson's all-white Galloway Methodist Church., Dorie and Joyce participated in the March on Washington in 1963, the Selma to Montgomery March of 1965, and the Poor People's March in 1968, as well as Hattiesburg's Freedom Day, a precursor of Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. Joyce led a campaign petitioning Governor Ross Barnett to free Clyde Kennard from Parchman Penitentiary. Joyce was denied voter registration in Hattiesburg three times due to literacy test failures, and Dorie was a plaintiff in the lawsuit that overturned inequitable voting requirements. They witnessed resalts of their work, including the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts., Dorie graduated from Tougaloo College, received a master's in social work from Howard University in 1976, and was a social worker at the District of Columbia General Hospital for thirty years. Joyce received a Ph.D. in sociology from Washington University, St. Louis, in 1968. In 1973, she became a professor and author and served as vice president (1990-94) and interim president (1994-95) of Howard University. Women like the Ladners not only helped end legalized racial discrimination but also helped ignite the late 1960s women's movement and supported legislation banning gender discrimination, which was added to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.