Paul Leslie Guihard

Paul Leslie Guihard was the only journalist murdered during the civil rights movement, killed in Oxford while covering the riots accompanying the integration of the University of Mississippi. Born in Saint-Malo, France, Guihard began working for the Agence France-Presse (AFP) at the age of nineteen. In his early life, he served in the French Army in England and Egypt as the Suez Canal Crisis (1956) began. After his military service, he returned to the AFP in their London branch, where he worked for several years. He then relocated to Paris and soon after transferred to the New York office. His coworkers nicknamed him “Flash,” in reference to his energy and enthusiasm.

Guihard was a playwright as well as a journalist, and his one-act play, The Deck Chair, had an off-Broadway run in 1961. He was a copyeditor during his stint in the AFP’s New York office but was sent to Oxford to cover the integration of the University of Mississippi. James Meredith, who was soon to become the university’s first Black student, had been fighting a legal battle for eighteen months, and the integration of the university was becoming recognized as a constitutional crisis of incredible proportions and thus had garnered international attention.

On 30 September 1962, Guihard and AFP photographer Sammy Schulman flew to Jackson. After stopping at the governor’s mansion to report on a White Citizen’s Council rally, Guihard called in his report and the pair drove to Oxford. Hearing conflicting reports from national news sources, Guihard and Schulman believed they may be too late for the story but decided to go on to Oxford anyway. Upon their arrival, however, the riots were in full swing, with federal law enforcement officers facing a crowd of more than two thousand hostile rioters.

Guihard was warned twice before entering campus, once by a Mississippi highway patrolman who informed him that he was entering at his own risk and that authorities could not protect him, and once by photographer Flip Schulke. Guihard dismissed Schulke’s concerns, saying he was “not worried, I was in Cyprus,” in reference to his earlier military service.

Guihard was found near Ward Dormitory less than an hour later, dying from a bullet wound that pierced his heart. Unable to see the blood through his tweed jacket, members of the crowd believed him to have had a heart attack and attempted to resuscitate him. These attempts were unsuccessful, and he died around nine o’clock that evening, before the paramedics could arrive. He was thirty years old. Investigations later revealed that he had been shot from less than a foot away, confirming that his death was a murder. He is buried in his hometown of Saint-Malo, France.

The FBI launched an investigation into Guihard’s death but was unable to uncover any witnesses or suspects. His case was revisited in 2009 as part of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act and the Department of Justice’s Cold Case Initiative, but the FBI no longer had the bullet or Guihard’s jacket and was thus unable to make any progress. The FBI closed the case in 2011. Guihard’s murder has never been solved.