Lawrence Guyot (1939-2012): chairman of the Freedom Democratic Party

Where did Lawrence Guyot come from?

He grew up in Pass Christian, a Gulf Coast town the SNCC Digital Gateway describes as the least typical part of Mississippi because of its Catholic church and labor unions. In 1957 he heard Medgar Evers speak there and decided to join the movement. He enrolled at Tougaloo College near Jackson on a scholarship, where Joyce and Dorie Ladner introduced him to SNCC.

What did he do for SNCC?

He became a SNCC field secretary working on voter education and registration across Mississippi, and in 1962 he directed the project in Hattiesburg. He was a regular at the Freedom House on Rose Street in Jackson. In June 1963, when COFO learned that Fannie Lou Hamer, June Johnson, Annell Ponder and others were being held in Winona, he drove there to post bail. Police jailed and beat him too. See Winona, 1963.

How did he lead the Freedom Democrats?

In 1964 he became the MFDP's founding chairman, with Fannie Lou Hamer as vice chair, and he stayed central to its work through the 1965 Congressional Challenge. He was elected a delegate to Atlantic City but did not attend, according to the Civil Rights Movement Archive, because he was out of jail on a property bond he would have forfeited. The archive's profile calls the 1965 challenge key to passing a strong Voting Rights Act. In 1968 he was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention with Mississippi's first integrated delegation; see the 1968 convention.

What did he do later?

He moved to Washington, D.C., graduated from Rutgers Law School, worked for the D.C. government and served as an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner. He kept speaking about voting rights for the rest of his life. He died on November 23, 2012, at 73. This address, guyot.html, was used for pages about him by an earlier site on this domain; we do not republish that site's newsletters or documents.