Court clerk to receive Trailblazer Award

The Little Rock Nine also will be honored.

COITSVILLE — Sarah Brown-Clark, clerk of Youngstown Municipal Court, will be presented the Trailblazer Award of the Donald Lockett VFW Post 6488 of Coitsville at 1 p.m. Jan. 21 at its annual Martin Luther King Jr. Luncheon, at the post, 2065 Coitsville-Hubbard Road.

The Rev. Jack Pettis, pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church of Youngstown, will be the keynote speaker for the luncheon.

A retired associate professor of English at Youngstown State University, Brown-Clark was elected to her municipal clerk position in 1999. She was the first black person elected to that job.

Over the years, she has served as a member and in leadership positions on a number of boards and committees in the community.

In addition to honoring Brown-Clark, the luncheon also will feature a special tribute to the Little Rock Nine to commemorate their role and the role of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the desegregation of the Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas 50 years ago.

A presentation on the Little Rock Nine and the Little Rock school desegregation crisis of 1957 will be given by Leon Stennis, a doctoral student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and a former Vindicator religion editor, and James Fortune, who formerly served as councilman of Youngstown’s 6th Ward and council president.

Stennis, who had just completed the ninth grade in Little Rock at the time, missed a year of school when Arkansas’ governor closed Little Rock’s four high schools at the beginning of the second year of desegregation at Central High.

At the time of the Central High matter, Fortune was a member of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division out of Fort Campbell, Ky., which was sent to Little Rock by President Eisenhower to quell the massive violence that erupted there and in other parts of that city.

Special coins produced by the U.S. Mint to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock Nine’s desegregation of Central High School will be presented to Brown-Clark and Stennis.

Other program participants will be William Cousin, post commander; Lloyd Mims, past commander; Minister Lawrence Thomas, associate pastor of Faith Temple Baptist Church in Campbell; Sandra Smith-Graves, vice principal of P. Ross Berry Middle School and president of the VFW Post 6488 Auxiliary; and Earl McAlway, past chaplain, who will present the Trailblazer Award.