Warrior for social justice speaks out

COEUR d’ALENE — On July 30, 1961, a 21-year-old archaeology student from the University of California, Los Angeles, was arrested in Jackson, Miss.

Max Pavesic and 14 others, black and white, held their ground in a “whites only” waiting room in a train station until they were charged with a breach of peace.

Nonviolent but defiant, the Freedom Riders were hauled off to a maximum security prison and held there near death-row cells for the misdemeanor crime.

“We were put in the paddy wagon, and at the end of the block in the street there was the National Guard with their rifles, their bayonets fixed into their rifles. There were state police, local police and plenty of police dogs, I remember that,” Pavesic said. “The police dogs were trained by an ex-Nazi who trained police dogs for Hitler … it just kind of blows my mind to know that this Nazi was selling dogs to the local authorities.”

Pavesic, now 75, recounted — during an informal presentation Friday afternoon at the Human Rights Education Institute — his experiences as a Freedom Rider and warrior for social justice.

Freedom Riders were part of the Congress of Racial Equality, a civil rights group that was instrumental in bringing about change during the American civil rights movement. The Riders’ primary goal was to peacefully challenge segregation that was still in place despite federal rulings against it. They rode buses into the Deep South and disregarded Jim Crow customs in an effort to eradicate the racial inequalities and shake up communities still practicing segregation.

“We weren’t breaking the law. We were testing the law,” he said. “We were breaking local customs, but we weren’t breaking the law.

“We were agitators.”

He described the intensity of the civil rights era — encounters with the Ku Klux Klan, brutal beatings and murders that occurred under the dismissive eyes of corrupt law enforcement, the pain and indignity that weighed so heavily upon the South.

“If you were black and you were walking down the sidewalk and approached a white person, in many cities, you had to get off the sidewalk to let that white person pass you by,” Pavesic said.

He said some Freedom Riders even signed their last wills and testaments before boarding the buses, not knowing what violence may be ahead. More than 400 people participated in the Freedom Rides.

“They really thought they were giving their lives,” he said. “Many had given their lives to the movement.”

Pavesic and his colleagues were incarcerated in the state penitentiary, Parchman Farm, for more than a month. He said at the time, it was considered the worst prison in the South and many people who entered were never heard from again.

But the Freedom Riders didn’t quit.

“What kept us going, what kept the camaraderie going, was singing,” he said. “We spent hours singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ and freedom songs. It would drive the prison guards nuts.”

Pavesic said his group was lucky because they were not beaten or injured, but the driver who transported them from Parchman Farm when they were released revealed that he was directed to leave them in the locked vehicle in the middle of nowhere.

“He was visibly shaken and he was ashen,” Pavesic said. “Who knows what the Klan had in store for us if that would have happened.”

Pavesic, of Portland, is a retired Boise State University professor. Dr. Lisa Manning, HREI’s executive director, said Pavesic was invited to visit Coeur d’Alene by North Idaho College’s Gender and Sexuality Alliance to share his experiences fighting for human rights, in light of the club’s work on the “Add the Words” movement.

“It’s a broader picture for us,” Manning said. “It’s about human rights, about speaking up for your rights, about making a difference in your own world. We’re all about education; you can’t get anywhere without any education. This is what we’re trying to promote, to offer to the community all kinds of opportunities for education.”

Pavesic’s daughter, Cammie Pavesic of Coeur d’Alene, is the producer and co-director of the “Add the Words” documentary film. She explained that the civil rights movement and segregation battles of the 1960s are akin to what Idaho’s LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community is enduring in the struggle to have “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” added to Idaho’s existing Human Rights Act.

“Human rights are human rights, they’re not special rights,” Cammie said. “‘Add the Words’ is not a gay rights movement, it’s a human rights movement. It’s exactly the same thing in that people are fighting for their rights to use the bathroom, to be served at a lunch counter.”