Mark Brehm Jr. was alone on the side of the road for hours.

But it didn’t matter to him.

Brehm, a Bloomsburg University student, peacefully protested for hours in downtown Palmerton by himself holding a “Black Lives Matter” sign on Thursday.

“I want to express that I am not the victim here,” Brehm said. “I have a lot of people feeling sorry for me, but I don’t want people feeling sorry for me. I want people to be feeling sorry for the true victims in all of this and that’s the black community.”

Brehm is originally from Hazleton, but has lived in Palmerton with his girlfriend since the pandemic started. He set up shop to protest by Palmerton’s welcome sign. Throughout the day he encountered various experiences with the locals.

“I was spit at, I had a couple of things thrown at me, curse words yelled at me,” Brehm said. “I even had two white men in a big lifted truck follow me as I walked home from my protest and harassed me verbally.”

Brehm continued about the exchange, “They said do you realize how much of an (expletive) idiot you look like right now?”

Brehm said they followed him home and one of the men waved him down. Brehm said, “Just to complain about how blacks take his money because he works hard and they don’t - that they take his money for SNAP and welfare. I responded that I’m on SNAP benefits, and he proceeded to say why would someone like you need that? I told the man I’m a college student and I make less than $10,000 a year and can barely support myself. He then said, maybe you should get an (expletive) job, because your education doesn’t seem to be paying off. I told him he needed to be educated more than I needed a job.”

However, Brehm noted that he received way more positive than negative responses from passer-byers.

“The minute I saw the George Floyd news I cried,” Brehm said. “I felt like it was my duty to do something. I am a white man, I have a voice and I felt like I needed to use my voice.

Brehm is a 2014 Hazleton Area High School graduate. He plans on protesting any day that he has some time.

“I just want to stress even more what I said before that I am not the victim. What black people are going through in the United States is 100 times worse than what I endured yesterday.”