Ninety-six-year-old Lorell Guydon credits her mother and father for ingraining the importance of education in their children when they were young and growing up during a time of segregated schools.
That passion has guided the Las Vegas resident well. Despite having to leave her town in order to attend high school, Guydon went on to college and earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D., before embarking on a long career as an schoolteacher and later a university professor.
The granddaughter of a former slave, and the only living sibling left among her 17 brothers and sisters, Guydon and her family lived on a farm lacking running water and electricity in Arkansas, where she said she and her siblings shared a joyful childhood.
She recalled spending time reciting poetry and playing with her older brothers.
“Most of the time, we did our homework on the kitchen table by lamplight which was very, very dim,” she wrote. “But there was an element of joy and camaraderie because you had ready help from the older siblings.”
Born as a twin, Guydon said her sister, Laurell Guydon, lived for mere hours after being born. Still, Guydon said she could feel her twin’s presence growing up.
Sometimes, she and her siblings would bump into her grandfather on the streets of a nearby town, and he would embrace his grandchildren.
It wasn’t until after she had graduated college and attended a family reunion that she learned her grandpa had been formerly enslaved.
“I didn’t know that he was a slave. He didn’t tell me,” Guydon said of her grandpa, who was 19 when slavery ended. “I was really surprised.”
If she had known earlier, Guydon said, she would have wanted to ask him questions about his childhood, such as what his house was like, how he was treated and whether he had been allowed to have any kind of schooling.
‘They didn’t want the slaves talkin’ ‘bout things’
Her grandfather, Leander Guydon, was one of more than 2,000 formerly enslaved people interviewed as part of the Slave Narrative project by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. Lorell Guydon said she would have been 8 years old at the time.
“They didn’t want the slaves talkin’ ‘bout things. One time I got ruffed up and I say I was goin’ to freedom,” Leander Guydon said in the WPA interview, when he was 89. “My ma put her hand over my mouth like dis, and say ‘you don’t know anything ‘bout what you sayin’ boy.”
He also spoke about life immediately after slavery was outlawed.
“After freedom, a heap of people say they was going to name their selves over,” Leander Guydon said in the interview.
Choosing a last name was one of many decisions — including determining where to live — former slaves had to make, Lorell Guydon said. Her grandpa’s family, she said, chose to take a slightly different version of the name of the man who used to own them — Joseph Guyton, a German immigrant and cucumber farmer.
Leander Guydon died of pneumonia in 1939, just a few years later at his home in Clarendon, Arkansas, his granddaughter said. He was 91.
After he died, his family didn’t have the heart to move his fishing poles from the garden. Lorell Guydon said she still envisions the grass growing tall around them.
Like her grandpa, her father, John Henry Guydon, never spoke about the family’s connection to slavery. People didn’t like to talk about it, Lorell Guydon said. “They were ashamed.”
“I am the second generation from slavery,” Lorell Guydon said. But growing up reading about it in textbooks, slavery felt so far away, she said. And yet, she said she knew that the discrimination her family grew up with was because of it.
Raised in the segregated South
Guydon fondly remembered playing Snow White as a young girl in a musical at her school, which went up to eighth grade. But, she noted, once students completed the year, there was nowhere in town for them to go to school.
“We didn’t have a high school for the Black population, and we couldn’t go to the white one,” Lorell Guydon said. She found a way to continue her education by staying with relatives in a different town in order to attend high school.
The education system was still segregated when Lorell Guydon began her undergraduate education at Stowe Teachers College, named after author Harriet Beecher Stowe, in St. Louis, Missouri.
As a college student, Lorell Guydon said she worked at a drugstore counter selling sandwiches and drinks. But she couldn’t eat at the counter. “Any Black person who came in, they could not be served at the counter,” she said.
While she never described herself as a “hardcore activist,” Lorell Guydon participated in sit-ins at locations of the same drugstore chain where she had found work.
“I was absolutely for making things better,” she said. “I sat in at the counter, and it was kind of fun. It was exciting and a tinge of fun, but we never knew what to expect. We never knew whether somebody was gonna pour coffee on us or rush us away.”
While no one ever did rush her away or turn physical, Lorell Guydon said that she experienced being both ignored and jeered at.
“It was not the best time, but we overcame. We really did,” Lorell Guydon said.
She joined civil rights marches, too.
“It had a kind of energy that we’re in this together,” Lorell Guydon said. “Marching has that effect on people. Whatever the march is for, when you’re in a marching cadence with somebody, with a group of people, and sometimes all you hear is just the footsteps, it’s really invigorating.”
After graduating college and working for a brief stint in Omaha, Nebraska, Lorell Guydon became a teacher in St. Louis, she said.
Her teaching career took her to Manhattan, New York, and eventually Stamford, Connecticut. After having taught elementary and middle school students for years, Lorell Guydon said she began teaching at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.
Along the way, she earned her master’s degree and her Ph.D. in language and literacy from Fordham University. She wrote that she retired from John Jay in 1995 after working there for 24 years.
‘A landmark day’
In 2006, Lorell Guydon decided to move to Las Vegas.
She arrived in the city on Christmas night. She and her brother had just driven across the country from her former home in Connecticut.
“By the time we got in here it was Christmas night, and we had dinner at a local diner,” Lorell Guydon said. “It was a landmark day to arrive.”
Lorell Guydon had discovered she liked Las Vegas while visiting her step-grandson from a previous marriage. “I like the excitement,” she said, recalling days spent sitting in Strip hotel-casino lobbies, reading and people-watching.
Since moving to Las Vegas, Lorell Guydon said she has been active with her church, Christ Church Episcopal, writing for the church newsletter and profiling church members.
“I’ve enjoyed being retired,” she said, sifting through the biographies she has written. “I live alone, but I’m not lonely at all.”
Contact Estelle Atkinson at eatkinson@reviewjournal.com. Follow @estelleatkinson.bsky.social on Bluesky and @estellelilym on X.