The University of Missouri is pleased to announce Joyce Ladner as the 2024 keynote speaker for the annual MLK Day of Celebration. 

Ladner was a professor of sociology, provost and interim president at Howard University from 1994 to 1995. She was appointed by President Bill Clinton in1995 to the District of Columbia Financial Control Board to balance the city’s budget after it became bankrupt. She was also a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.  

A native of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, she began her fight for social justice as a teenager when she helped organize an NAACP Youth Chapter in her hometown. She was expelled from Jackson State College in 1961 for organizing a civil rights protest.   

Ladner was on the front lines of most of the major civil rights protests in the ’60s including Greenwood, Birmingham, Albany, Georgia, Selma and Jackson. As a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), she was mentored by civil rights pioneers Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker. She worked with slain civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Vernon Dahmer and two of the three civil rights workers, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, who were murdered during Mississippi Freedom Summer.   

She was on the 12-person staff that organized the March on Washington in 1963 under the direction of Bayard Rustin and A. Phillip Randolph in Harlem. She was on the stage when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have A Dream” speech. She also is portrayed in the 2023 movie “Rustin” as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. 

Ladner earned a B.A. from Tougaloo College (1964) and a Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis (1968).