Lawrence Guyot

Lawrence Guyot. . Born and raised in Pass Christian, Lawrence Guyot Jr. learned about voter discrimination and began registering citizens to vote while a student at Tougaloo College. He became a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi. In 1964, Guyot chaired the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, challenging the state's all-white Democratic Party. He earned a law degree in 1971, moved to Washington, DC. and worked for justice the remainder of his life. , Lawrence Guyot Jr. (1939-2012) was the oldest of five sons. His mother was a domestic worker and his father a carpenter in Pass Christian, Mississippi. Raised in a Catholic family, Guyot attended parochial school and then public high school. At Randolph High he was on the debate and basketball teams and earned a college scholarship. In his part-time jobs, he learned about labor unions. At age eighteen he heard NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers spak about racism and Black voter suppression. Motivated by Evers, Guyot enrolled at Tougaloo College and began his civil rights journey. , While still in college, Guyot became a field secretary for SNCC and began working on voter registration. In McComb, he and other SNCC workers participated in a protest march and were beaten and arrested. They also organized a Freedom School. During a Greenwood voter registration he was arrested again. Guyot became the director of SNCC in Hattiesburg and worked with churches and religious leaders from around the country for social justice. In 1964 he graduated from Tougaloo with degrees in biology and philosophy and continued his civil rights work throughout the state. , In 1964 Guyot was elected chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which challenged the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party for seating at the Democratic National Convention. He was unable to attend the convention because he was in jail for registering Black people to vote, but the MFDP's efforts were precursors to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. , In 1966 Guyot ran for Congress as an anti-Vietnam War candidate. Although unsuccessful, he continued his activism and received a law degree from Rutgers University in 1971. He moved to Washington, DC, and worked for Pride, Inc., a youth employment program, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. , An advisor to Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching in 2004, Guyot continued his political activism throughout his life and was an active member of the Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. Just as he had dedicated his life's work to others, Lawrence Guyot generously shared his experiences in many histories, documentary films, and interviews. A significant oral history interview of Guyot conducted by noted civil rights activist Julian Bond in December 2010 may be found in the Civil Rights History Project of the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. , Guyot died in 2012 at age seventy-three at his home in Mount Rainier, Maryland, of complications from heart disease and diabetes. He and his wife, Monica Klein Guyot, had two children, Julie Guyot-Diangone and Lawrence Guyot III. , [Captions] , Left column, top to bottom: , . At Tougaloo, Guyot met supportive faculty members and student activists, including Joyce and Dorie Ladner, who introduced him to Bob Moses of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). He met other young leaders at the SNCC Freedom House in Jackson. From left, Hollis Watkins of McComb, Bob Moses, and Lawrence Guyot at the National Student Association Conference in Bloomington, Indiana, in August 1963. Photo: Leni Sinclair/Getty Images , . Guyot directed the Freedom Summer Project in 1964 in which some 800 college student volunteers came to Mississippi to work in voter registration, Freedom Schools, and other civil rights initiatives. Photo courtesy Herbert Randall Freedom Summer Photographs, University of Southern Mississippi , . One of Guyot's many reports on potential violence at voter registration meetings – this one from an Itta Bena church – from the Sovereignty Commission files at the Mississippi Department Archives and History. , . The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a state agency that spied on activists and tried to derail the civil rights movement, investigated Guyot and kept files on him. At left he is identified as a demonstrator outside the Hinds County Department of Public Welfare in Jackson. Photo courtesy Miss. Department of Archives and History, Right column, top to bottom , . In June 1963, Fannie Lou Hamer and other activists were jailed and beaten in Winona. Guyot went to bail them out and was himself arrested and attacked. In the photo Guyot shows the deep bruises from the assault. While he was in jail, Medgar Evers was assassinated, a tragic event strengthening Guyot's dedication to the cause of justice. Later that summer he was arrested and sent to Parchman (Mississippi State Penitentiary), where he was beaten severely and went on a hunger strike. Photo: Jim Boudier/AP , . Sam Walker (left) and Guyot (holding stack of papers) are working with summer volunteers at the Freedom House in Gulfport in 1964. Three of the Freedom Summer civil rights workers – Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner – were tragically murdered that summer near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Guyot always regretted telling Goodman that he would be safe working in that area. Photo courtesy CRMVET (Bay Area Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement) © Ellen Lake , . In 2004, Guyot took part in a panel in Washington, DC, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the murder of those three civil rights workers in Philadelphia. Photo: AP/Matthew Cavanaugh