Oral history with Lawrence Guyot

              An Oral History with Lawrence Guyot
This oral history is provided through a cooperative project of USM Libraries and USM's Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage It is presented here for reference purposes only. Interviews in this collection are protected by copyright and PERMISSION TO PUBLISH MUST BE REQUESTED from the Center for Oral History and Cultural Heritage. Please call ( 601) 266- 4574 for more information.
Biography
Lawrence Guyot was born in Pass Christian, Mississippi, on July 17, 1939. He attributes his family's intense political involvement to their association with the Catholic Church and their union connections through Ingalls Shipyard. Guyot himself was a member of the International Longshoremen’s Association. Growing up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Guyot says that he experienced little racism: he rode any bus he wanted to, used public libraries, and wasn't aware of any African American who had been turned away from registering to vote. His activism heightened when he found out that, despite the fact that Leflore County had 80 percent African- American population, not a single African American was registered to vote. It was for this reason that he chose to attend Tougaloo College, where he learned about what was happening in other parts of Mississippi. In 1962 he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC). Some of the people who had an influence on Guyot during his Tougaloo days were Ernest Borniski, Edwin King, A. A. Branch, and John Salter. As a SNCC field secretary, Guyot was active throughout Mississippi. One of his first assignments was in Greenwood, where he was to register voters, identify local leaders, and conduct voter registration demonstrations. His activities led to his imprisonment on two occasions, once for two months in Parchman Prison and once in the local jail. Both arrest took place because he was part of demonstrations intended to ask the local chief of police for protection for African Americans when they attempted to register to vote. He was also involved in the distribution of privately donated food after the Leflore County federal commodity distribution cutoff. Guyot was also involved in civil rights activities in Hattiesburg. In 1963 he got the National Council of Churches to invite church people from all over the country to Hattiesburg for a voter registration demonstration. While Guyot was in Hattiesburg, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was organized. Guyot was the chairman and a delegate to the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. His arrest in a picket line resulted in his spending the duration of the convention in the Hattiesburg jail. Guyot's concern over civil rights continues today. He sees the Freedom Summer as the " high- water" mark of the civil rights movement and believes that there is a need to " replicate" the Summer Project in certain places in the United States today.
mus- coh. guyotl. doc Page 1 of 30