James Pleasant Breeden was born in
Minneapolis, Minnesota on October 14, 1934, as the only child of Florence Beatrice Thomas and Pleasant George Breeden. His mother worked as a secretary and his father was a railroad dining car waiter. James was raised by his mother and his stepfather, Noah Smith. In his youth, James was a
Boy Scout who reached the rank of
Eagle Scout. He attended Harrison Elementary School and Lincoln Junior High School, and graduated from North High School in 1952 as class
salutatorian. James Breeden graduated cum laude with a
Bachelor of Arts degree from
Dartmouth College in 1956, where he was also a member of the
Casque and Gauntlet senior society. During his time at Dartmouth, Breeden and the two other African-American men in his class were assigned a mandatory living situation together in the only room at the top of Topliff Hall, where they would often find racist notes left outside their door. Breeden said that they "didn't even consider protesting" because "We just accepted it as what one would expect at an institution like Dartmouth". Breeden was part of the debate team, but was asked to sit out of the national debate tournament which was held at the segregated
Johns Hopkins University. He also attended a lecture by
Thurgood Marshall who visited the campus as part of the "Great Issues" lecture series. In 1959, Breeden received a certificate from the
University of Geneva for his work at the
Bossey Ecumenical Institute of the
World Council of Churches in Switzerland, and in 1960 he graduated from Union Theological Seminary in New York with a
Master of Divinity degree. Breeden was ordained as a priest in the
Episcopal Church after moving to Boston the same year. He was a member of the episcopal diocese of Massachusetts, acting as a deacon, priest and canon until 1965. In 1969, Breeden became an associate professor of the social policy program at
Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he received his
doctorate in education (EdD) in 1972. While on a sabbatical the next year, he helped to establish a master's degree program in education administration at the
University of Dar es Salaam in
Tanzania. He was an
associate professor at the
University of Massachusetts from 1976 to 1978, and from 1978 to 1982 he was a senior officer in the Office of Planning and Policy in Boston Public Schools. In 1982 he became director of the Center for Law and Education in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was Dean of the
Tucker Foundation at Dartmouth College from 1984 until 1995, where he found the campus "radically changed" from his time as a student there. From 1994, Breeden was a
visiting scholar of the
Howard Graduate School of Education. He became a member of faculty at the
School for International Training in 2001. ==Freedom Rider==