Lawrence Guyot picked up the phone and dialed allies, associates and acquaintances, whomever would answer his call. With a baritone voice vaguely resembling that of a southern preacher, he woke them because there was serious business afoot – a book about the civil rights movement was being discussed on C-SPAN.

That it was early on a Sunday morning was of little concern. There was crusading to be done, history to be taught, and no hour of the morning was too early for it to start.

A well-worn warrior of the 1960s civil rights movement, Guyot is adamant that no one forget the lessons of racial discrimination and the struggle for voting rights. Whether the current issue is school board representation, statehood, neighborhood development or term limits, he conjures up those lessons almost daily in his efforts to organize the people of the District of Columbia.

Unlike many of his colleagues from the civil rights movement, who moved on to tidier careers in government, academia or law, Guyot, 61, has chosen to continue trudging neck-deep in the protracted battle for racial justice. And he has emerged as a provocative figure.

As an advisory neighborhood commissioner for his LeDroit Park neighborhood and a community organizer, he has fashioned himself a life as a crusader for the poor and the black.

"Guyot is the quintessential freedom fighter," says Washington Times columnist Adrienne T. Washington, who has known Guyot since the 1970s when she was a young beat reporter for the defunct Washington Star.

"Some people think he’s stuck in the ‘60s, but ... you can never be out of sync fighting for people. ...That can never be passé."

Guyot’s critics contend, however, that his polarizing tactics stymie his ability to help the people, despite the political capital he enjoys from his civil rights history.

Raised on the Gulf Coast in segregated Mississippi, Guyot was the eldest son of a clan that wielded unusual power for a middle-class black family in the South.

That power was exercised primarily in the Catholic Church and local politics, and Guyot says he learned his lasting lessons in those venues. His grandfather and father were prominent lay leaders who drew the church’s influence into the political realm. Guyot’s great-uncle was a longtime chairman of the Hancock County Republican Party, and his father frequently traveled around the county with Lawrence to register blacks to vote.

By the time Guyot arrived at Tougaloo College in 1957, it had become the organizing hub of Mississippi’s civil rights movement. The college welcomed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and offered credit for students to work as organizers. Guyot says the school insisted students take their books with them to demonstrations so they could study in jail.

"Tougaloo was to me an intellectual oasis," Guyot says. "In a state that was anti-intellectual, that was anti-thought, that had one form of government – and that was a policy of rigid segregation – there was an oasis of people who believed in the correlation between information and people."

One of the most influential of those people was Ernst Borinski, a German Jew who taught Guyot his most important political lesson. Borinski "made sure that we understood that politics had to be tied directly to people, it had to be done in their frame of reference."

With that lesson in his mind, Guyot forged further into the fray, starting as a field secretary with SNCC in 1962, working throughout the Delta.

During a memorable campaign that year in Sunflower County, SNCC field workers persuaded a group of laborers to try registering to vote.

But when SNCC’s old, yellow bus arrived at the courthouse in Indianola, no amount of encouragement or prodding from Guyot and his colleagues could get the group to budge. Everyone sat still, terrified to enter the courthouse. Finally, a plantation timekeeper named Fannie Lou Hamer made the first move.

She failed the literacy test and was not allowed to register. Though she knew she would soon lose her job and her home because she had tried to register, Hamer emerged from the courthouse unshaken.

In the years to come, she would ascend to the leadership of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and become immortalized for her stirring, hymn-like oratory, including the oft-quoted statement: "I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired."

"That to me is victory," says Guyot. "Getting someone to do something…that they make happen."

During those Mississippi years, Guyot saw much brutality. He was jailed and beaten countless times. He says he was scheduled to drive home with Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney on June 21, 1964, the night they were murdered outside Philadelphia, Miss. He and Monica, a SNCC organizer from Berkeley, Calif., who became his wife in 1967, received frequent death threats. He says the state’s racist Sovereignty Commission has his name listed at least 12 different ways, files he says he’ll pick up "as soon as I get me a good truck."

According to historian Michael Sistrom, Guyot played a critical role in building the state’s movement – part of a core of native Mississippi students that gave the movement local credibility as a truly indigenous project.

"I’d argue that other than (Robert) Moses, Guyot was the biggest theoretical and strategic ‘thinker’ of the early Mississippi movement," said Sistrom, a doctoral candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who is writing a dissertation on the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. "His biggest contribution, of course, was in being part of formulating the idea of organizing a permanent, local political organization to push and then live beyond the more symbolic protests to gain the right to register."

That organization became the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Upon graduation, Guyot some of his civil rights colleagues in Washington, D.C., a city that he says was the source of hope during their struggle in Mississippi and embodied the promise of racial equity.

Over the next 30 years, Guyot became a ubiquitous ingredient in the District’s political stew. With an encyclopedic knowledge of politics, and teeming with passion, he jumped into countless battles, small and large. With loosely defined jobs in various city agencies that allowed him the freedom to do his community organizing – a freedom that some say smacks of patronage – and wielding his activist resume, Guyot made a name for himself.

He has become "a major opinion-maker in this neighborhood and probably in forums throughout the city," says Maybelle Taylor Bennett, director of Howard University’s Community Association.

But not without causing some bad blood.

At a recent community forum about development in Columbia Heights, for instance, Guyot presided over a roomful of residents anxious about gentrification and displacement. He promptly informed the group that he would be acting as a benevolent dictator for the day’s session, displeasing many in the room and prompting two of the invited speakers to leave.

"I’d rather do an effective job in a meeting than make one friend in a meeting," he says. At the Columbia Heights forum, "I wanted to send a message of immediacy, of danger."

His critics argue that in communicating his message, he does more to fan the flames of racial tension than extinguish them.

"He is the first person to throw the race card out there," says Glenn Melcher, an ANC commissioner who has served with Guyot since 1996 and recently replaced him as chairman of their Ward 1 commission.

But Guyot does not apologize for introducing race into any and every debate.

"I am prepared to say at any time, in any forum, that race is the pervasive issue in the District of Columbia, that race is the pervasive issue in the United States of America," he declares. "There is no decision made in Washington that does not pivot on race."

Nik Eames, another ANC commissioner and a Guyot protege, says that even when Guyot is divisive, his message about hidden impacts on minorities and low-income people frequently rings true.

"Sometimes you have to take the message; the messenger is less important," Eames says.

Eames cites last summer’s school board referendum as a prime example. Guyot led the ANC’s fight against Mayor Anthony A. Williams’ plan to convert four seats to appointed positions, calling it an attempt to weaken the black vote and joining forces with some frequent political foes.

The referendum narrowly passed, but the election returns indicated that many black voters shared Guyot’s take on the issue.

On another issue, Guyot’s tactics led to a standoff that consumed his ANC for more than a year.

The situation began in 1997, when the city audited ANC 1B’s finances and issued a scathing report that eventually led to Mary Treadwell’s guilty plea for "improperly divert(ing)" $10,900.

Treadwell, a former wife of former mayor Marion Barry, had led the city’s second-largest ANC for several years. When she resigned in the shadow of controversy, she left behind a bitter division.

"Within the realm of law and politics, when my friends are under attack, I consider myself under attack," Guyot says. "I do not disassociate from my friends when they are under attack.…I do not retreat."

Guyot says he directed his ire at Melcher and Gary Imhoff, a former ANC commissioner and vice president of DCWatch, in particular, because they had led the FBI into the ANC office after the report from the city auditor uncovered Treadwell’s role in the missing funds.

"That was a break in thought, temperament and action," says Guyot.

He contends Treadwell was a committed and concerned commissioner, who should not have been "treated like a common thief."

Melcher disagrees. He says Treadwell committed a crime and that getting everything into the open was critical for the ANC to move on. Guyot, he says, would not allow it to do so.

"They constantly made it a racial issue," says Melcher. "It clearly wasn’t a black and white issue…but they made that point each and every time they got a chance."

After some months, the ANC’s paralysis lifted once Guyot realized that he needed the help of the other camps to accomplish anything for their neighborhoods, Melcher says.

But another commissioner says the freeze never really stopped.

Tom Coumaris, who served with Guyot for eight years, says he left the commission because Guyot usurped power from individual members by ignoring the commission’s common practice of single-member deference – allowing commissioners to guide the decisions about projects and issues in their neighborhoods.

Without single-member deference, Coumaris says the ANC ceased to be important to his Dupont East neighborhood. He contends that Guyot undid single-member deference, which he supported as vice chairman, once he became chairman because he "wanted to be chair of 24,000, not just the chair of the confederation."

Indeed, Guyot’s heavy-handedness has deterred some neighborhood activists who freely criticize him, but not for attribution – fearing public denouncement.

Melcher, who notes that his working relationship with Guyot has improved markedly of late, says Guyot’s intelligence and shrewdness make him a tough political opponent.

Even so, Melcher was able to unseat Guyot as the commission’s chairman in January by winning several votes that had historically been in Guyot’s corner.

"It is no longer Mr. Guyot’s commission," Melcher says. "It is the commission of the commissioners now."

But one of those unexpected votes, Catherine Hammonds, said it was not a criticism of Guyot; rather, it reflected sentiment that a change was needed.

Though Guyot’s power on the commission may be diminishing, his influence in his neighborhood has not faltered. Howard University’s Bennett points out that Guyot keeps on getting reelected, even when he doesn’t place his name on the ballot.

"Guyot comes with some credibility that he built in standing up for black peoples’ rights in Mississippi," Bennett says. "He is not just any resident. He is a resident who put his life on the line."

She adds that for the young, he symbolizes an important set of values that "when you know you’re right, you don’t back down."

Every year, Bennett invites Guyot to address the new group of AmeriCorps volunteers that she oversees and offer his view of District politics. Invariably, half of the group leaves feeling uncomfortable while the other half leaves feeling proud, she says, a trend one sees in many of Guyot’s audiences.

But his most important audiences may be the young ones.

Guyot and his wife, Monica, who have two grown children, Julie and Lawrence, have invested much of their lives working with youth. His city jobs have commonly been youth-focused, while Monica runs a daycare center in Columbia Heights.

In the end, Guyot has become a crusader for his community, says David Corry, a longtime LeDroit Park resident who has worked with Guyot through the neighborhood’s civic association.

"Sure he’s provocative, but that’s his style, and he effectively uses that style," Corry says. "If he has a point to be heard, it will be heard."

Copyright 2001, The Common Denominator