Joyce Ladner

Joyce Ann Ladner (born October 12, 1943) is an American civil rights activist, author, civil servant and sociologist.

Ladner was born in Battles, Wayne County, Mississippi, on October 12, 1943, and grew up in nearby Hattiesburg. She was raised with four brothers and four sisters. Ladner began school at the age of three and graduated high school in 1960 with her older sister, Dorie. She went to Tougaloo College in Tougaloo, Mississippi, where she earned her B.A. in sociology in 1964, and then to Washington University in St. Louis, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1968. During college, Ladner and her sister Dorie organized civil rights protests alongside Medgar Evers and other students from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She and her sister were arrested and jailed for their activism. She told PBS of her activism in Mississippi:

It was very, very difficult to continue because the local police and all the towns had almost crushed us. They were closing in like… They murdered people, they beat people, arrest was about the least harmful thing to occur.

In 1968, she was appointed assistant professor of sociology and curriculum specialist at the South Illinois University at East St. Louis. In 1969, she became a senior research fellow at the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, Georgia. Other major research positions that followed include transracial adoption work funded by the Cummins Engine Foundation, and a visiting fellowship at the Metropolitan Applied Research Center.

In 1970, Ladner conducted postdoctoral work as a research associate at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In Tanzania, she completed research on "The Roles of Tanzanian Women in Community Development." In 1977, she embarked on a study of "The Impact of the Civil Rights Movement on the Career Patterns of Ex-Activists," which was funded by the Ford Foundation. The next year she served on the committee on Evaluation of Poverty Research at the National Academy of Sciences.

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