Лоуренс Госсет: Американ саяхатшысының өмірі мен қызметі

American politician

Lawrence Edward Gossett (born February 21, 1945) is an American politician and activist who served as a member of the nonpartisan King County Council, representing District 10 from 1994 to 2006 and District 2 from 2006 to 2020. Gossett served as chair of the Council in 2007 and 2013.

Gossett was born in Seattle to two sharecroppers who had emigrated from Nigton, Texas, to the Central District. He graduated Franklin High School in 1963 and later graduated from the University of Washington. In 1966 and 1967, he was a VISTA volunteer in Harlem. He initially joined VISTA for the draft deferment; his time in Harlem politicized and radicalized him.

Returning to Seattle, he became a founder of the Black Student Union on the UW campus He graduated from the UW in 1970, receiving the university's first ever degree in African American studies. Before he had even formally received his BA, he became the first supervisor of the Black Student Division in the university's Office of Minority Affairs. The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project describes him as having been, in the late 1960s, "one of Seattle’s best known young black radicals." A former member of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he worked as a community organizer in Seattle. While still working for the University of Washington, he was involved in the occupation of a former Seattle public school that ultimately became El Centro de la Raza. His continued involvement in civil disobedience led to a request to "cool it", from the head of the Office of Minority Affairs, Samuel E. Kelly. Eventually, he left his position at the university. After working on the successful 1977 mayoral campaign of Charles Royer, he served briefly in the Royer administration, but felt that was taking him too far from his work as an activist. From April 1979 to December 1993, he was the executive director of Seattle's Central Area Motivation Program ("CAMP"). By Gossett's own account, he attended the founding meeting of Seattle's Panther chapter, and also attended Panther leader Bobby Hutton's 1968 funeral; he worked on several political actions with Panther Party members and has said positive things about their legacy. Gossett has admitted in recent years that he was a long time member of the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party.

Gossett was elected to the Council in 1993. Gossett ran unopposed in 1999, 2003, 2007, 2011 and 2015. Gossett's office in the King County Courthouse is in the same location that his prison cell was in 1968 when he was arrested for unlawful assembly during a sit in at Franklin High School on March 29. He was defeated by Girmay Zahilay in the 2019 election after serving six terms.