Lawrence Guyot Jr., born in 1939 and raised in Pass Christian, Mississippi, became a leading civil rights activist after learning about voter discrimination, hearing Medgar Evers speak about racism and Black voter suppression at age eighteen, and enrolling at Tougaloo College. While still a student, he began registering citizens to vote, became a field secretary and later a leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi, organized protests and a Freedom School in McComb, was beaten and arrested there, was arrested again during voter registration work in Greenwood, and directed SNCC in Hattiesburg while working with churches and religious leaders for social justice. In 1964, after graduating from Tougaloo with degrees in biology and philosophy, he chaired the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the state's all-white Democratic Party for seating at the Democratic National Convention, though he could not attend because he was jailed for registering Black people to vote; its efforts were precursors to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He also directed the 1964 Freedom Summer Project, in which some 800 college student volunteers came to Mississippi for voter registration, Freedom Schools, and other civil rights initiatives, and he endured further arrests, beatings, and surveillance by the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission. In 1966 he ran for Congress as an anti-Vietnam War candidate, then earned a law degree from Rutgers University in 1971, moved to Washington, DC, and continued working for justice through Pride, Inc., the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, civil rights teaching, political activism, oral history, documentary films, and interviews. He remained active throughout his life, served with the Veterans of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, and died in 2012 at age seventy-three at his home in Mount Rainier, Maryland.