Paul Murry:
I remember when you spoke at Siena College you talked about your early involvement in the Movement at the time of the Freedom Ridesin 1961 when you had gotten arrested in kind of a spontaneous sit-in at a drug store.
Luvaghn Brown:
Yes. That was my first involvement. But first, a little background. I had finished high school and I had left home. I left school and I never went back home. My home was not a place you wanted to go to anyway. It was about the time I graduated from high school that I left and never went back.I stayed with any number of people in any number of places. The Freedom Rides were going on. The news then was not like it is now. So, unless you got a newspaper or somebody let you look at a TV you really didn't know what was happening. The Freedom Rides came to Jackson [MS] and I met a couple of people from the Freedom Rides. [James] Bevel and Bernard Lafayette whom I still have a lot of respect for.
There were a small number of things a Black child or a Black person could do in Jackson. You could be a garbage man or you could be a teacher. There wasn't much you could be. I had gotten a job in what used to be called an ice house. I finished high school in June. I signed up for the military because that was another thing you could do.
In the interim, the Freedom Rides hit Jackson. Bevel and Lafayette came to where we used to hang out and they talked about it. They talked about what was happening in Jackson. They talked about a lot of things we already knew because we lived it. I paid attention to them, but not really.
One day Jimmy Travis and I were walking in downtown Jackson. There wasn't much for a Black kid to do in downtown Jackson. Jimmy and I got it into our heads that it was time we got involved, that we did something. So we went into the drug store. We sat down. The drug store was set up so you could go next door and buy stuff for school and stuff like that, but you could not eat at the restaurant. So Jimmy Travis and I decided that's what we were going to do. We went into the drug store. We sat down, and, of course, we were asked to leave, first by the waitress, then by the manager, and then by the police. From then on I was involved in the Movement one way or another.
Murray:
How old were you at this time?
Brown:
I was 16 years old. I finished high school when I was 16.
Murray:
So that was your baptism into the Movement.
Brown:
Right. I got arrested a few times after that. Most of the stuff in the beginning was direct action. There was a boycott of the county fair in Jackson and I got picked up for that. They used to have a week for the white patrons and then the Black patrons went afterwards. I got arrested there. Then I got arrested for sitting on the white side of the courtroom. When I went back to report for the military, they said they can't take me because I had been arrested at the drug store.
Murray:
You were a trouble maker.
Brown:
Yes, I was.
Murray:
In some of the interviews with [Lawrence] Guyot I've read online he talked about the Freedom House. Hanging out with people from SNCC at the Freedom House. Was that something that you were familiar with?
Brown:
Yeah. That's where I lived for a while. The Freedom House was located in what was called the Black neighborhood. I don't know how we got the house. When SNCC people and volunteers came into Jackson they stayed at the Freedom House. Freedom House was an interesting place. White people used to stay there. Black people used to stay there. For some reason it was liberated. I don't know why. I used to stay there. Jesse stayed there — Jesse Harris. Guyot stayed there for a while when he was in Jackson. People from SNCC. People that SNCC had recruited. I lived there with Jesse Harris. We were fairly permanent. Jesse, myself, and Guyot — we were the permanent residents if you will.
Murray:
Guyot must have been four or five years older than you.
Brown:
Jesse was older than I was. Everyone was older than me. Guyot, I don't know how old he was. But you're right. He was older than me because he had gone to college.
Murray:
Then at some point you were sent or asked to go to Greenwood [MS].
Brown:
Right. Correct.
Murray:
Sam was already there. Sam Block. And Willie Peacock. I don't know if Peacock was from there or was sent there, but he came in and out. Sam was a (unclear) and I was and Guyot was. I don't know how we got to Greenwood. I don't know if Bob [Moses] said "You guys need to go to Greenwood." I think it was just a matter of "We need people in Greenwood. That's where things are kicking off. We have enough people here in Jackson." I don't know. But anyway, we ended up in Greenwood.
Murray:
By this time now the focus had shifted or was shifting away from direct action to voter registration.
Brown:
Right. That's what Greenwood was about.
Murray:
He (Guyot) was always very political.
Brown:
What we were trying to do in Greenwood was to convince people to go down (to the courthouse) to register to vote. It was also at this time that a lot of the civil rights organizations started to work together. Sam was from the NAACP. I don't know where Willie was from. Guyot and I were from SNCC. People like Amzie Moore that lived in the Delta were members of the NAACP.
Murray:
People involved with the NAACP were involved with voter registration before anyone else.
Brown:
Correct. Guyot and I were there and, of course, we had to find a place to live. I think Sam had already found the place. I'm trying to remember what was on the first floor, but we got the second floor. I forget what was on the first floor, but we were on the second floor. There was one entrance to the building.Our job was to go out each day and try to convince Black citizens especially to register to vote. Those were the times they had the poll tax. For the people who went to register there was an interpretive part and the registrar would ask you questions about the constitution. But they really could have been about anything. And it was really designed so that you couldn't answer the question. A lot of people didn't want to go for very valid reasons. People were getting killed. That had been going on in Mississippi for years. Greenwood was a dangerous place to be. If they found out you went you could lose your job.
The people that lived in either Greenwood or Jackson were used to living in Mississippi. What I mean by that is there was a way of living where we stayed away from each other. It was clear to everybody that the white man was a joke. Greenwood more so. The Delta more so. But that's what was going on. To make a living or to live or to do whatever, most of the people that had any nerve at all would go [to register]. But most people were just barely making it. So it was very difficult to get them to go. And it was important to us that we be on the streets every day so people could see us and infer that we were not afraid and they had no reason to be afraid.
Murray:
When things got difficult you were not going to leave town.
Brown:
Correct. And things did get difficult. The way we worked it's tough to remember anyone being in charge. I imagine Guyot was or Sam was. I wasn't. My opinion mattered because I would talk to people. And Guyot was like that. I looked up to Guyot because he was one of the smartest people I ever met.
Murray:
That certainly comes across in some of the video interviews I've seen.
Brown:
Right. He was a very smart guy. He came from the [Gulf] Coast in Pass Christian. They used to do stuff that wasn't always legal. He came up in that environment. It was almost like at times he wasn't afraid of dying. He would do stuff most of us would say "You shouldn't do that" or "You shouldn't talk to a person that way." And Guyot had a lot of nerve. I liked him a lot.
Murray:
The one time I met him he was very generous with his time, with me. I got a very favorable impression of him as well.
Brown:
I knew his wife. They moved down to D.C. at some point and I had gone down to D.C. to visit. We spent some time together, but I didn't know her well. She came to a reunion with Guyot. His health was failing then. He had all these books. He was selling them or giving them away. He didn't even know how he was getting back to the train station. I could tell he wasn't doing well. I took him to the bus station.He had all of these books. I managed to get them in the car. You could tell he wasn't doing too well then. When he was active, he was a guy to work with. He wanted his opinion heard, and he did have them. When he used to tell jokes and stuff, at first you wouldn't get it. He loved to use big words. Maybe that was just who he was. He would say something, and we would say, "What the hell are you talking about?" But he would explain it. I don't know how to explain him. It was fun living with him.
Murray:
Not only was he educated and intelligent, he was also very courageous.
Brown:
At times it was like dying didn't occur to him. I don't know how to explain that. I don't know if it was because of where he grew up or what he did growing up, but he had a lot of courage. He felt that he had rights and these people were just getting in the way of him exercising his rights.I'll talk about myself. When I was coming up, it took me a while to get onto the fact that my anger would lead me do things and it was okay to do them. For a lot of what I did, believe it or not, I was afraid. Guyot never seemed that way. He just seemed like "This has to get done and I gotta go through this guy to do it." When we would go to the courthouse or we would go wherever, Guyot was the guy. He didn't mind showing he was smarter than they were and he had the nerve to do what he was doing. If I remember back then, that was true. It got me to do a lot of things, watching him.
Murray:
You see somebody who is acting courageously and getting away with it, that would be inspirational.
Brown:
You know, it was more than that because he would explain stuff and he was one of us. There's always been the separation of people from Mississippi and people not from Mississippi. The people who came into Mississippi, they lived in a different world. They lived in Tennessee or places like that where they'd gone to college. Guyot understood what could happen and he knew a lot about the State of Mississippi and he knew instinctively where we were coming from. He understood the fear. He understood how we came up. He understood a lot of things about the South. I think that gave him some creds in our eyes. It's not that he made you feel less than. It's just that he was going to take you along with him.
Murray:
You had other people equally active in the Movement. People like Bob Moses, for example, who came from a very different environment. He certainly worked successfully in that environment, but I'm sure people were aware that he was not a native Mississippian.
Brown:
Not only were they aware, it took him a while to learn that people came up differently. Because he believed that people should vote, that they should go where they wanted to go, well they did where he was from. They didn't where the average Mississippian was from. Those were the people I always looked up to because it took a lot of courage to do what they did.
Murray:
I'm assuming that after Greenwood your paths kind of separated.
Brown:
I'm trying to remember if I did anything with Guyot after I came back to Jackson. I'm trying to remember when I went to Chicago because it was not too long after that. I graduated in '61. Maybe the end of '62 I left Mississippi and went to Chicago. I think that's right. I remember when I arrived in Chicago that it was freezing. I remember that I went there after the food and clothing drive because the coat I had on was a coat I had gotten from one of the trucks that brought down the clothing to Greenwood.
Murray:
After the [government surplus food] commodities had been cut off [by county authorities].
Brown:
That's right.
Murray:
So that could have been late fall of '62 or winter of '63.
Brown:
That's right. I did the March on Washington and stuff like that from Chicago. Jimmy was also in Chicago. Jimmy Travis. He and I spent a lot of time together.
Murray:
Was that before or after he got shot? I'm thinking that was a little later. Maybe '64 or '65.
Brown:
He had been in Chicago and then left. I don't think he came there to get well.
Murray:
He had gone back to Mississippi from Chicago. There was a lot of stuff happening in '65 [1964?] around the passage of the Civil Rights Act where people started testing the integration of the movie theatre and things like that. But you were in Chicago at that time.
Brown:
Yeah. I never did anything at the movie theatre.
Murray:
That's my understanding. It was that period of '61-'62 that you had worked most closely with Guyot. Then he becomes more involved with the Freedom Democratic Party in 1964. He does not go to the Atlantic City convention because he's in jail [in Hattiesburg]. His loyalty moves from SNCC to the FDP and he becomes much more the politician in the period from '64 to '68. After '64 his health becomes much more of a problem and he leaves Mississippi, eventually settling in D.C.
Brown:
Part of his problem was the diabetes he had.
Murray:
What you've given me is very helpful. I had not come across what you told me about his character. His courage and his apparent fearlessness in the face of a lot of danger.
Brown:
He was a piece of work. He really was. I was glad I got to live with him. He was always getting on Jesse [Harris]. He was one of the guys. He fit in. What's important was that a lot of the SNCC people would come through the Freedom House. [Julius] Lester and [Chuck] McDew came through — he became Jewish. McDew was something else.So, a lot of those people would be there. When we were not active out doing something, when we could afford beer. Whenever SNCC got enough money together to send a paycheck, people would be sitting and talking. And Guyot intellectually would fit into that. I didn't. I had the feeling, but I didn't have the knowledge that he had. I would sit in the meetings. Guyot was a character. He didn't give in to people easily. He would discuss strategy. If somebody else's idea was better, fine. But if his idea was better, he'd make it known what he thought about that. He didn't get as much credit as he should have gotten for a lot of his ideas and a lot of the things he did. But Guyot was busy being a fighter in the beginning as opposed to an idea person. He had an idea of what should happen and he would go make it happen. That's who he was.
Murray:
I've come across at least half a dozen lengthy interviews he did at various times in his career. One where he's being interviewed by Julian Bond which covers most of his adult life. But he's always referring to things that he's read or encouraging other people to read a book that he'd found helpful. He's very much interested in the world of ideas. In many ways he's trying to educate people or persuade people to see things his way.
Brown:
I would buy that. I told you when he came to the reunion, he brought all these books. [I asked] "How did you get all these books here?" and "How are you going to get them home?"
Murray:
Maybe he wasn't planning on taking them home.
Brown:
He wasn't. He was an interesting read. He had the courage to fight, but he was a bit of an intellectual. He believed in ideas and he worked on them. At the same time, he understood a lot of the people in Mississippi who were fighting. He understood the fight. I think a lot of people who came to Mississippi did not. They understood what was going on. They understood what was going on, but they didn't understand the people and I think Guyot did.
Murray:
Because he'd grown up there. One thing that I remember. Over the years I've done many interviews with people who were active in different phases of the Movement. Guyot seemed really eager to share with me what he thought and what he felt was most important. He was trying to educate me about the Movement and not just answering the questions I put to him.
Brown:
Than sounds like him. He and Bob [Moses] used to get into it now and then. Because Bob was nobody's dummy. Bob grew up in a different world. Bob's way of working was to tell people what he thought or tell people what to do. I realize now that I look back that he was much younger than I thought he was. Because everybody was young in those days. But if you are 16, you think everybody's not young.So Guyot used to have his own ideas about what needed to happen or what the people were like. I think he was one of the people that educated people about it. Medgar [Evers] understood it. He just had a different way of approaching things. He was NAACP. In the beginning he thought we were a little crazy and moved a little fast. He soon became a part of that. He used to come up to the office and try to explain what we should be doing and stuff. But it was like not in a way that made people upset at him. That's just who he was and we weren't going to pay any attention to that. Bob was different. I don't know how to explain it, but he was different.
Murray:
One of the things I remember from Ed King's lectures was how Medgar Evers moved from being very supportive of the bureaucratic approach used by the NAACP to much more of the movement oriented tactics that were associated with SNCC.
Brown:
Right. He did.
Murray:
Not initially, but as the Movement developed, there was that tension between, it's hard to call the NAACP conservative organization, but they had a conservative approach.
Brown:
And to be honest, they had successes that we had not had. The argument always was, we need something else. Medgar used to come by and we would talk about what the NAACP was. Eventually, a lot of the stuff we did he supported. Not actively, but he could understand the anger that was involved in getting it done and why people went and did what they did. It was somewhere in between that we worked [together]. Then Medgar slowly became more of an activist. That's not to say that what he was doing was not activism. It was just of a different kind. Eventually he bought into a lot of the stuff we were doing. Especially when the Movement pivoted from direct action to political stuff. He thought that should happen. Medgar became more of a part of what was going on.
Murray:
The NAACP had been doing voter registration all along.
Brown:
Correct. The other thing was he was sort of pulled into places like Greenwood because he worked around Jackson and that area and it was slightly different. But when you get to the Delta it's totally different. We were willing to do that and Medgar came to understand that he could do that too. It was good working with him. I learned a lot from him. Different stuff.Somewhere you asked why we don't hear more about a guy like Guyot. One of the things I'd like for people to understand is the people who came into Mississippi from wherever they came, when they came into the South. You will notice, for the most part, the historians, the writers, they don't write about Mississippians other than Fannie Lou Hamer. I was asked a question once who was my hero. I said it then and I meant it then and I mean it now. "You've never heard of the people I consider my heroes because you've only heard about the people who came into the South.
Diane [Nash] was one of them. Bevel is one. All those people, did not ignore, but felt that they had the right idea and we couldn't possibly. Guyot got caught up into that. The people that came in from colleges or from working someplace else, gave up what they did to come into Mississippi, it took them a while to understand there are people here. There are ideas here. There is a way of living. You need to know that. Then you can get people to do things.
That's one of the reasons you don't hear about all of the "soldiers" who participated in the Movement. Books aren't written about them. Movies aren't made about them. But these were the people who did things. What about Fannie Lou for instance? I respect everything she did. But what about all those people who made that happen? What about the Guyots who worked in that environment? Or Amzie Moore?
Murray:
That's the name I was going to mention. He had been working on voter registration for 20 years before SNCC people arrived. That's who Moses sought out. He heard from Ella Baker that he was the man to talk to. In every community there were people like that. Some people were critical of Aaron Henry because he not been as much of an activist as some people might like. He had been leading the NAACP in Mississippi and surviving for many years before the activists came from other places.
Brown:
The people who came into the state, especially during the Freedom Rides, but even afterwards, they knew what needed to be done. They knew how they lived. They knew how we lived, but they didn't know the people. Not only the people, but how they lived, what they had to do to get along, what it took for them to feed their families. Also, historically, a lot of things had happened in places like New York and New Orleans to move people forward.Now Guyot was his own person. He was not a politician in the sense we mean. Julian Bond was one of the nicest people I ever met. John Lewis, when he was first starting out in the Movement, John Lewis did a lot, but when he was first moving up in the organization (SNCC) a lot of the prejudice they had against the southern Blacks came out. John didn't get the recognition he should have gotten at first. As he moved up and did things people began to notice him. I'm just saying that there was an attitude and I think that's why Guyot didn't get his due. People like him were the ones who made the movement.
Murray:
I learned a good bit about his family. They had been on the Gulf Coast for a long time. They had never been sharecroppers, had never been directly under the thumb of white employers. One scholar who had gone into the family history of the Guyots unearthed that one of his ancestors, his grandfather's brother, had been very active in Republican politics, chairman of the County Republican Party, and served as postmaster whenever a Republican was elected president. You've got people like that who understand the importance of politics and had been involved and continued to be involved in politics. People who were registered to vote, more so than in the rest of the state. And their vote was solicited by white candidates.
Brown:
Gulfport and Biloxi were always different. I think that's what people didn't understand about what was going on. They felt like you had to be a poor sharecropper to be of value. Remember, before we had the Democrats, we had Republicans. I forget when they made the switch. It used to be that the Republicans were the ones who were for a lot of rights.
Murray:
There was a time when some of the best federal judges were the Republican appointees. Funny how that has flipped.
Brown:
Lyndon Johnson did that. When he signed the Civil Rights Act. He said as much.
Murray:
He was a son of a bitch, but he did the right thing more often than not.
Brown:
He had the nerve to do what he needed to do.
Murray:
More than most people who occupied that office, he knew how to use the power of his office.
END OF INTERVIEW
Copyright © Luvaghn Brown & Paul T. Murray. 2022
Copyright ©
Copyright to this web page, as a web page, belongs to this web site. Copyright
to the information and stories above belong to the authors or speakers.
Webspinner:
webmaster@crmvet.org
(Labor donated)