The year was 1965. The place, Flint, Michigan. Paul Harasim remembers the day vividly. “My freshman year at Flint Junior College I saw this beautiful young lady working in the library,” he says. “She happened to be African American, more stunning than Nefertiti. She had a speaking voice I found mesmerizing.”
Flint in the ’60s was a thriving blue-collar paradise. Both black and white families prospered, but rarely mixed. Yet Paul pursued Patricia Harden relentlessly. “I started to talk to her a good bit, walk with her on campus; she thought my classes were near hers, but they weren’t,” he says.
Paul became editor of the student newspaper, and Patricia founded a human rights council, both contributing to each other’s projects. They talked on the phone nearly every day, and would listen to records at her house—Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, Motown. After months of friendship, Paul finally found the courage to ask Patricia out.
“Quite frankly, I was stunned by her response,” he says. “She said no. While she said she really cared for me, she also said interracial dating in Flint probably would mean we’d end up beaten or worse.”
“To me he was just my best friend,” Patricia recalls. “Then one day out of the clear blue sky he said he wanted to go out with me, and I looked at him and said, ‘Are you crazy? You’re white and I’m black.’”
Paul was incredulous. And persistent. He went so far as to call Patricia a hypocrite, asking how she could fight for equality on one hand, and on the other reject him because of what the outside world might think. Finally, Patricia said yes.
“I fell in love with her, hard,” Paul says.
It was a time when black men and white women rarely dated and white men and black women never did, Patricia remembers. But a year and a half after their first date, Paul asked her to marry him. Her love was strong, but her fear was stronger. She told him she believed an interracial married couple would be killed in segregated Flint. Paul fell apart, but Patricia remained firm. She had experienced things he hadn’t.
“I think he didn’t feel any of that, because he was white. White people grow up thinking everything’s all right and they can do anything they want to do. Black people grow up thinking, if I try they’re going to stop me; if I succeed they’re going to knock me down. ... He was angry with me, very angry with me, because Paul was such an idealist and I’m more of a pragmatist,” Patricia says. But it went deeper.
“I was angry at the country, that we were living in a place where something like skin pigmentation made a difference. I was angry that she couldn’t see it,” Paul says, “because she was such a bright and intelligent soul.”
They parted ways, only speaking once or twice after that, though Paul kept in touch with Patricia’s mother.
He joined the Army and left for Vietnam on April 4, 1968, the day Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. When he returned, he moved around the country working newspaper and communications jobs, while Patricia remained in Michigan, teaching. Both couples married within their own races and had children. And unknowingly, 40-something years after he'd proposed, both ended up divorced and living in Las Vegas.
Patricia was watching Nevada Week in Review one Sunday. “I see all these old white men sitting on a panel, and I hear this voice,” she says. But she didn’t recognize anyone, until the panelists’ names appeared onscreen. He was no longer a strawberry-blond toothpick, but she knew it was him. “I screamed! I freaked,” Patricia says. “I couldn’t believe he was actually in Nevada.”
The next day, she called him at his desk at the Review-Journal. “Do you remember Flint JC?” she asked when he picked up.
“Not only do I remember Flint JC, but this is a voice I had been hoping to hear for decades,” he said.
The two arranged to meet near UNLV and walked the campus, as they had in Flint 40 years earlier. “It was so comfortable,” Patricia says. “It was like we had never left each other.”
One year later Paul asked Patricia to marry him. This time she wasn’t afraid.
