On this day in 1938

Dec. 17, 1938

L.C. Dorsey worked for Head Start in 1964 and later Operation Help before meeting Fannie Lou Hamer, who inspired Dorsey to join the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Credit: Mississippi Civil Rights Museum

L. C. Dorsey was born to a sharecropping family in Tribbett, Mississippi. She became friends with Fannie Lou Hamer, who inspired Dorsey to get involved in the civil rights movement and to join the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, for which Dorsey began organizing boycotts and demonstrations. 

She began working for Head Start and then Operation Help. After getting her doctorate from Howard University, she returned to Mississippi and resumed her work with Head Start, this time as the director of social services in Greenville. She also began working on prison reform, serving as associate director of the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons from 1974 to 1983. 

Dorsey wrote a book, “Cold Steel,” describing life in Mississippi’s Parchman prison, and served on President Jimmy Carter’s National Council for Economic Opportunity. 

In 1988, she became executive director of the Delta Health Center in Mound Bayou and later worked as a clinical associate professor for the University of Mississippi Medical Center. 

She died in 2013. An annual award honors her work, and so does the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.

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