Larry Gossett

Gossett addressing a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day rally at the Franklin High School gymnasium (2006).

Gossett was born in Seattle to two sharecroppers who had emigrated from Nigton, Texas, to the Central District.[3] 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.[1][4] He initially joined VISTA for the draft deferment; his time in Harlem politicized and radicalized him.[5]

Returning to Seattle, he became a founder of the Black Student Union on the UW campus[1] and helped to organize nearly a dozen high school and middle school Black Student Unions throughout Seattle.[4] As a student activist, he was instrumental in bringing about the UW's Educational Opportunity Program minority recruitment program. He also played a role in the discrimination of black track athletes from Oregon State University, resulting in their early departure from a track meet.[6] 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").[1][4] He eventually worked on Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns.[5]

Gossett is married and has three children.[1]

• Gang of Four (Seattle)

• King County Councilmember Larry Gossett, County Council Website
• Larry Gossett, Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, University of Washington. Includes extensive video interview footage, mostly about the period from 1966 to 1974.