George Houser was a teen when he first got involved in civil rights, but his stories today at Rockland Country Day School were more of an inspiration and call to action than a history lesson.

Houser, 92, spoke to the teens in Marc Pessin’s history class about both his early and his late civil rights work, in this country in the 1940s and 1950s and in Africa in the 1970s.

After talking about segregated restaurants, buses, trains, roller rinks and movie theaters in the 1940s, he explained how 24 black and white members of the newly formed Committee on Racial Equality quietly sat in restaurants for hours until they were served or stood in line at the roller rink until they were sold tickets.

He talked about the 1946 supreme court case that was a precursor to Rosa Parks that determined that segregation on buses and trains was an undue hardship on interstate commerce. He talked about CORE’s determination to test whether the Supreme Court ruling held sway in the South. The Journey of Reconciliation he went on in 1946 (and the later one in the 1960s) included tales of arrests, polite bus drivers who neverthless insisted the black residents get to the back or sit in designated places, police who refused to arrest people and his own attempts to break the color barrier at blacks-only venues.

“You don’t plan it, it just kind of happens,” Houser told the students. “You take that one step. You don’t know where it’s going to go.

“I can now look back and see various things that got me nvolved, that I certainly wasn’t planning for. Watch for things that will happen to you (because) one things leads to another. You meet somebody and you are faced with a problem, you have to make some kind of a decision. Who knows where it will lead?” he said.

“And that’s the thrill of life. If you are open to it and have faith, you will do something with your life and that’s what happens.”