Growing up in the 1940s in rural Palmers Crossing, a Black community on the outskirts of Hattiesburg, Miss., Dorie and Joyce Ladner did not know that there were other youngsters beyond their town who shared their concerns. That there were others who were tired of riding in the back of the bus.
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Tired of seeing their friends and family pay poll taxes, face rigged voter literacy tests, use public restrooms with separate entrances for “white ladies” and “colored women.”
After graduating from high school in 1960, they left the cloistered hamlet for college in Jackson, Miss. — arriving just as a newly formed group called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was setting up a statewide grass-roots voter registration campaign.
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The Ladner sisters were ecstatic.
“To discover so many other young people ready for change was energizing,” Dorie Ladner recalled. “To see that they were willing to come to Mississippi and help us fight for freedom, that was empowering.”
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In 1961, Dorie, then 18, and Joyce, 17, joined SNCC. That was 60 years ago, but the experiences were so intense that the memories make it feel as if they occurred only yesterday. The violent resistance to change that they witnessed — the desperate efforts of white supremacists to recoup any loss at the voting booth, by hook or crook — provided a lens through which they have viewed the nation’s ongoing racial struggles ever since.
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“When I saw that man strolling through the Capitol on January 6, waving that oversized Confederate flag, I was not surprised,” said Joyce Ladner, now 77, and a longtime resident of the District. “That is what they have been trying to do since the start of the Civil War — reestablish white supremacy as a founding principle of the nation.”
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In a quest to better understand the nature of racism, Joyce Ladner stepped back from SNCC’s grass-roots efforts to pursue a doctorate in sociology. The Ladners’ mother had been a homemaker and she implored her daughters to get an education. In studying sociology, Joyce believed she could honor her mother’s wishes while also advancing the cause of civil rights by devising policies and programs that would help ameliorate the impact of racism.
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She went on to become a noted sociologist and, from 1994 to 1995, served as interim president of Howard University. Still, she said looking back on those years, “I felt guilty leaving Dorie on the front lines.”
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But that’s where Dorie Ladner wanted to be. “I didn’t think you could get a better education than being on the front lines with SNCC,” she said.
Now 78, Dorie Ladner went on to earn a master’s degree in social work at Howard University and spent years as an emergency room social worker at D.C. General and St. Elizabeths hospitals.
Those years living through segregation, bearing witness to the bombings, beatings and killings, created both an atmosphere of terror and awareness. And that’s why both women have been shaken to see a mob of people march on the Capitol, some waving a flag that has been used to terrorize Black people.
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Confederate flags were ever-present in their home state of Mississippi. And for all the talk of how the flag is little more than a way to honor ancestors who fought on the battlefield, the Ladners were witness to how that flag was used to torture people who looked like them. Their lives are marked by some of the modern civil rights era’s highest-profile killings.
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On June 12, 1963, Dorie Ladner and other SNCC activists had dinner with Medgar Evers, who was Mississippi state field secretary for the NAACP. Afterward, Evers got into his car and headed home. “I remember him saying, ‘I will see you all in the morning,’？” she recalled. Later that night, she learned that Evers had been fatally shot in the driveway of his home in suburban Jackson by a Klansman.
The memory still causes their hearts to race. “To this day, I do not get into my car at night with the interior lights on,” Dorie Ladner said. “And I also try to sit with my back to a wall at the rear of the room whenever I go out, just in case I need to get out fast.”
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A couple of months later, the sisters were on the National Mall for the March on Washington after having helped raise funds for the event. They were uplifted by Martin Luther King’s soaring speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Two weeks later, they were in Birmingham, Ala., listening to King’s brokenhearted eulogy for the four Black girls who were killed when dynamite planted by the Ku Klux Klan exploded inside the 16th Street Baptist Church.
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Dorie Ladner recalled that the Alabama National Guard, which had been federalized to protect the mourners, had both the U.S. flag and the Confederate flag stitched into their uniforms. “As if they couldn’t decide whose side they were on,” she said. “Watching them standing around as the pallbearers brought those four caskets from the church left me in a state of rage.”
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There would be more pain and more rage.
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The following summer, on June 12, 1964, Dorie Ladner attended a SNCC “Freedom Summer” voter registration orientation. When it ended, she waved good night to one of the participants, a civil rights worker named Andrew Goodman, as he ran to catch up with two others who had attended orientation: James Chaney and Michael Schwerner. They rode off together in a blue station wagon, headed for Neshoba County where a church they intended to use as a “Freedom School” had been firebombed.
Their burned-out station wagon was found the next day in the Bogue Chitto swamp, and the bodies of the three civil rights workers were discovered 44 days later buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Miss.
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The assassination of King would follow in 1968, and SNCC began to disengage.
Still the Ladners were also able to bear witness to what those many sacrifices had led the country to, such as the passage of the civil and voting rights acts, a more integrated and even welcoming world to people of different colors. Even their home state of Mississippi moved to replace the state flag that had the Confederate battle insignia embedded in the design.
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But then came the insurrection at the Capitol and it became clear that Confederate symbols and what they stand for are embedded in more than cloth.
The SNCC 60th anniversary conference, twice delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic, is now set for a virtual meeting Oct. 14-16. There will be plenty of reminiscing, no doubt, but the main purpose will be a discussion about passing the activist torch to a new generation and how to prepare them.
Dorie Ladner said there is one thing that they need to know: “The war is not over,” she said.
To read previous columns, go to washingtonpost.com/milloy.
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