#joyce ladner

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Joyce Ladner - SNCC Digital Gateway

While Joyce Ladner was a Tougaloo student, she was in and out of the Delta and other parts of the state, helping organize SNCC voter registr

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Atlanta, Georgia. A Toddle House has the distinction of being occupied during a sit-in by some of America’s most effective organizers. In the room are Taylor Washington, Ivanhoe Donaldson, Joyce Ladner, John Lewis behind Judy Richardson, George Green and Chico Neblett., Danny Lyon, 1964

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From the early days of the Civil Rights movement, African American women have worked and served in numerous and influential leadership roles. What are their experiences and what changes have taken place in their opportunities, expectations, responsibilities, and obstacles?  For our eighth annual McGowan Forum on Women in Leadership, a distinguished panel discusses their personal journeys and advice they would offer to young women in the struggle for equality.

Moderated by Melissa V. Harris-Perry, host on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, and author of Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, panelists include Joyce Ladner, sociologist and civil rights activist; Janai Nelson, associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund; Avis Jones De-Weever, Exceptional Leadership Strategist and immediate past Executive Director of the National Council of Negro Women; and Charlene A. Carruthers, national director, Black Youth Project 100.

This program is presented by the National Archives in partnership with the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It is generously supported by the William G. McGowan Charitable Fund, Inc.

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A Watershed Moment for Some of Freedom Summer’s Veterans

What do you do when your mentors, colleagues, and friends are gunned down, beaten, imprisoned, and left for dead on the side of the road? You fight harder for what they were fighting for. That was one of the many lessons that were shared by four Mississippi Freedom Fighters earlier this week at the Library of Congress. Legendary civil rights strategist and scholar Bob Moses; activist and former President of Howard University Dr. Joyce Ladner; journalist, author and Mississippi SNCC worker Charlie Cobb; and Mississippi native, activist, and social scientist Dorie Ladner all recounted incidents from their time on the front lines in Mississippi both before and during 1964’s Freedom Summer, the 50th anniversary of which will be commemorated next month in Jackson and other Mississippi locations. Wesley Hogan, Director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, served as moderator. 

The program, sponsored by the Library and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History, brought together these once-fiery individuals to recount the legacy of their work in Mississippi in the run-up to the 50th anniversary commemoration of Freedom Summer. Titled “Many Paths to Freedom: Looking Back, Looking Ahead at the Long Civil Rights Movement,” the program stretched an entire afternoon and was capped with an address by Moses on the Constitution and the American educational system. The afternoon also featured the showing of a 30-minute 1964 documentary, The Streets of Greenwood and a discussion of the newly launched Library of Congress Civil Rights History Project Digital Interviews Website. 

Iconic civil rights leader Bob Moses being interviewed by Wesley Hogan of Duke University at the Library of Congress.

The emotional center of the program proved to be the dialogue among the panel of four civil rights veterans. When asked by Hogan about their mentors in the movement, first Moses, then the Ladner sisters recounted how one after another of their friends and mentors were killed for attempting to win their freedom. Medgar Evers, Herbert Lee, Vernon Dahmer, Clyde Kennard, Louis Allen, George Lee—the litany was horrifying and, eventually, overwhelming. Moses, who is known for his calm and quiet rationalism, shed tears and had to stop talking about the atrocities, overcome as he was with grief.  Dr. Ladner audibly wept, saying, “I never break down like this in public, but after 50 years of carrying these tragedies, I guess it’s time to let them go.” It was an electrifying moment that brought home to those in attendance the incredible price paid by these indomitable individuals to move our country forward.

"Medgar's assassination was the catalyst for Freedom Summer."                                                                                            Bob Moses

It wasn’t all grief and tears, though. Charlie Cobb recounted a debate between the SNCC leaders in the early Spring of ’64 about whether or not to move forward with the concept of Freedom Summer. Cobb admitted that he and several others were against the idea. His concern was that the fragile grassroots leadership that they had developed during the previous 18 months might collapse once better educated and richer whites from the North descended. Apparently the debate raged for weeks, with locals like Dorie Ladner urging her colleagues to proceed with the plan. “I was all for Freedom Summer, “ Ladner recalled. “I wanted them to pull back the curtain and let everyone know what had happened to us in Mississippi. We needed outside intervention.” 

This “radical” idea was to have Northern college students spend their summer attempting to help local civil rights organizers register blacks to vote in Mississippi and to establish “Freedom Schools” to help local black children to understand that they, too, had Constitutional rights and a rich legacy of black activism and resistance to white oppression.

  Civil rights veteran and author Charlie Cobb telling a SNCC story to  Dr. Joyce Ladner (l) while sister Dorie Ladner (r) listens attentively.

Cobb was finally convinced by none other than sharecropper and SNCC activist Fannie Lou Hamer. “Charlie,” she said to him. “I don’t understand you at all. You’re an outsider [Cobb was from Washington, DC) and we let you come help us.” Cobb realized that you can’t say you’re trying to develop grassroots leadership and then veto their wishes when they don’t meet your expectations. 

Moses insisted that it was the assassination of Medgar Evers that provided the catalyst for Freedom Summer.  “Medgar’s death crystallized the forces that made Freedom Summer possible,” he said. Those forces included attracting the attention and energy of Allard Lowenstein and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party; Robert Spike and the National Council of Churches; and the leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Together these three disparate groups provided the manpower (Lowenstein), the funds (NCC), and the leadership (SNCC) to make Freedom Summer a reality. 

Dorie Ladner concurred with Moses’s assessment and added her own personal reflection. “I was devastated when Mr. Evers was murdered. He was my mentor, my friend. But we just kept on pushin’,” she said. “It didn’t stop us.” 

 After this powerful discussion, Moses took center stage to discuss the ties between what he called “sharecropper education” and today’s educational system. Moses recalled during a deposition for a voting rights case, he was asked by a segregationist white jurist, “Why are you taking illiterate blacks to register to vote?” It was an epiphany moment for the activist. How can you deny the black sharecopper a proper education, and then when that same individual attempts to register to vote, deny him that Constitutional right because he/she has not been properly educated? That insight set Moses on a new course years later when he instituted The Algebra Project—a program designed to teach poor blacks the essentials of mathematics in order to compete in the digital age.

  Bob Moses makes a point about the American educational system which, he posits, provides people with "sharecropper education"--"just enough knowledge to do the job they need you to do."

Moses likened today’s education to the sharecropper’s education—teaching the sharecropper just enough in order to do the job of chopping and picking cotton. “People were educated to the work they were assigned,” he said. “It’s the same today.” In a wide-ranging discussion, from the Reconstruction era to yesterday’s news, Moses drew analogies and comparisons that were enlightening, scholarly, and extremely well informed. (Has anyone read the Boutwell Commission Report—an 1876 U.S. Senate investigation into the terrorism of the 1875 Mississippi elections?  Moses has, and cited the 2,000-page document as just one of his many sources for his masterful presentation.) Education, he insisted, is the key to extending the voting franchise and, no less, to the survival of our democracy. 

The Library of Congress leveraged the star power of this event to announce the launch of its Civil Rights History Project—a 2009 Congressionally mandated capture of oral histories of those who were on the front lines of the groundbreaking civil rights movement. Nearly 150 interviews have been recorded so far: more than 50 are now available on the new site: http://www.Loc.gov/collection/civil-rights-history-project/about-this-collection/. Respected historians and scholars such as Julian Bond, John Dittmer, Taylor Branch, and Emilye Crosby conducted the interviews during the past several years. It is a treasure trove of civil rights history, something to be cherished and sifted through for further illumination.

  Flier announcing the Library of Congress program.

If this event was any indication of what is to come next month during the 50th anniversary commemoration of Freedom Summer, participants should be forewarned. MS Freedom Summer 50th  promises to be an emotional watershed event in the lives of those who lived through that fateful summer, as well as for those who plan to study it and learn its many lessons. 

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Civil rights activist Joyce Ladner discusses organizing the March and how they got the word out before the existence of social media.

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poverty never created immorality. poverty created want.

joyce ladner