Sound Shore

A group of teachers met after school at Port Chester Middle School today and received an impromptu lesson on civil rights history. Breness Smith, 73, shared his experience of leaving New Rochelle in the late ‘50s for an athletic scholarship at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina. In 1960, he sat down at a lunch counter and joined a wave of civil disobedience actions in the segregated South.

The middle school is getting an early start preparing for Black History Month and Martin Luther King Day. Suffice it to say, it’s been a very big year for diversity milestones in Port Chester and the nation.

The school board includes the first Hispanic ever to win elected office in Port Chester, and the village board includes two African-American men who are the first minority voices on that panel.

At the invitation of teacher Gerald Washington, Smith talked about his experience. “This guy is like a diamond to me,” Washington said.

Smith joined a committee of five people at the college who were inspired by a lunch counter sit-in by four black students at North Carolina A&T. The movement “spread like wildfire” to historically black colleges. In 1960 — without telling his mother back in New Rochelle — he met with other students in a church to talk about nonviolent resistance.

Smith joined a group of students and sat down at a whites-only lunch counter. They didn’t budge after being punched and hit while police watched, “smirking, overall.” Some of the students were big football players; Smith played baseball.

“They did not flinch, and I did not either,” he said. They were cuffed and taken to jail, until the college president came, livid, and had them released. Smith said the experience lives with him every day. Civil rights would not be won until after he came back north. A retired human resources professional, he lives back in New Rochelle.

His youngest son now attends North Carolina A&T, he said, “where all of this began.”

Photos: Breness Smith, top, and Gerald Washington