Activist's Friends Praise a Life Well Led

Lawrence Guyot Endured Beatings for Civil Rights

Longtime civil rights activist Lawrence Guyot's friends got together at a dining hall at the Washington Navy Yard this month to thank him for a job well done.

There were those who met him in Washington, such as Nia Kuumba, 78, a D.C. community activist who marched on Washington with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 and lobbied for home rule with Guyot decades later. And there were those who were with Guyot in Mississippi, such as Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.). She met him when, as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Guyot was threatened, jailed and beaten -- several times almost to death -- only to continue his work demanding equal rights for black Americans.

"I come here to introduce him only because Martin, Medgar and Malcolm are unable to do so," said Timothy Jenkins, a longtime D.C. educator who met Guyot in Mississippi 45 years ago as Jenkins was creating schools for black children. "He is significant not because he risked his life. He is significant because he knew there is a price more ultimate than death. It is disgrace."

Dozens of Guyot's relatives, friends and colleagues from the civil rights movement through his activism in District politics characterized him as a warrior with a kind heart who still bears physical scars from his efforts to wrestle down Jim Crow 50 years ago.

"So many of our legendary figures end up never really getting the accolades and appreciation that their actions warrant," said James Berry, one of the organizers of the event. "We wanted to . . . say thank you for sacrificing your time and talent on behalf of our people."

A highlight of the evening occurred when Norton described meeting Guyot only a few hours after the murder of civil rights icon Medgar Evers as Guyot sat in a jail cell.

It was June 15, 1963, a few days after Evers was shot in the driveway of his Jackson, Miss., home. Guyot, then a 24-year-old SNCC volunteer, had gone to Winona, Miss., five days earlier to bail out colleagues from the civil rights movement, including the famed Fannie Lou Hamer and June Johnson, who had been arrested while working on voter registration. Instead of being allowed to post their bail, however, Guyot was beaten bloody and jailed.

"If I had lived what Guyot had lived, I never would have gone to that jail, especially as a black man," Norton said. "There in Mississippi for two days, I saw it at its worst and I saw it at its best. Because of Larry Guyot, I understood what it meant to live with terror and to walk straight into it."

Guyot, 68, said the incident at the Winona jail reaffirmed his commitment to civil rights because he realized the extent to which segregationists would go to interfere with the movement. Men claiming to be FBI agents tried to interview him. His cell was unlocked and a knife placed nearby as a temptation to try to escape.

One night, the jailers took him behind the jail and identified him to a huge crowd of glaring white men gathered there.

"Now you know what he looks like. You can take care of him whenever you find him," Guyot recalled the jailer telling the whites.

Guyot was released in time to attend Evers's funeral June 19, 1963, at Arlington National Cemetery. He believes he would have been killed if Evers had not been. "They would have had too much of a hard time explaining some more dead civil rights workers" to the FBI agents and Justice Department officials who converged on the state.