Freedom Rider Tells His Story

Freedom Rider Paul Breines had questions long before he boarded a bus in July 1961 to challenge the Jim Crow segregated south.

His questions included what does it mean to be a Jewish person, a white person? What would it feel like to be a black person?

He asked himself where he would fit in a photograph he saw as a youngster. A black and white photograph of a lynching. Two young black men hanging dead from a limb above a crowd of white people, men and women in shirt sleeves, some smoking, some smiling.

He still has questions, he told students at Cohen Hillel Academy and their guests, fellow students from the KIPP Academy in Lynn.

He was the featured speaker Monday, presented by Facing History, an international educational nonprofit that encourages reflection about justice and equality.

He needed no microphone. He moved around the room and paused, and told the young people how his pursuit for answers drove him to take small but important steps.

As a child he wondered why it was that he had a black nanny, Mary Van Hook, but there were no white nannies for black children.

He wondered about privilege and exclusion.

He felt the unquestioning air of the 1950s when a Jewish boy he knew was denied entrance to a white party.

He remembered thinking about the strength inside race music — the name for rock 'n' roll in the 1950s — and wondering where that strength came from?

A formative moment came when he was at a fraternity party at his college, the University of Wisconsin. Earlier, he had learned about four young men who took seats at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina seeking service in a section reserved for white people.

At the fraternity party, Paul took off his hat and told his "pledge father" in the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity, Ralph Leavitt, that he was going to pass it to collect money for the defense of the men in Greensboro.

His pledge father slapped the hat to the floor and said there would be none of that "n-loving" stuff.

"Something happened to me at that moment," Paul told the students.

He had been given an identity by an ugly racist comment.

Later, he ended up making a pledge of another sort, pledging nonviolence and a willingness to go to jail as part of the Freedom Riders' movement.

They were a group of some 400 people who boarded buses for rides into the south to challenge Jim Crow laws that segregated black people from white people on buses, in restaurants, at schools.

He and others were jailed for breaching the peace, challenging segregation.

He was sent to a prison in Mississippi where he spent a month before he was freed.

His parents, Simon and Nessie Breines, received hate mail after his mom told the local newspaper, The White Plains (N.Y.) Reporter-Dispatch, that she and his father were proud of his willingness to be arrested for the sake of justice.  

The actions of the early 1960s had power, Paul told the kids on Monday. They gave rise to acts later in the decade that led to voting rights, civil rights, rights for women.

Paul went on to raise a family and teach history at Boston College.

He lives in Boston and is still wondering what it means to be a jew, to be a white person, and what it feels like to be a black person.

"I've been thinking about what it means for 60 years," he said.

During a question and answer part of the presentation audience member Efe Airewele asked what do you do when someone makes a racist comment?

Her question inspired more questions and no definite answer other than maybe using humor, if possible, to channel anger and open conversation.

Efe said in an interview after the presentation that she was struck by how important little things were in Paul's life.

Classmate Precious Parker, 14, will remember how dedicated he was to a cause and think about how that cause continues.