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Lessons in nonviolence Youngstown schools, city promote week of awareness
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PEACEMAKERS: Youngstown students, from left, Mallory Kimble, Janae Ward and A’Ja Glover, stand in front of a message board at Chaney Middle School featuring quotes on nonviolence. The three organized a project to reduce violence in their schools.
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THE MESSAGE: One of the quotes on a bulletin board at Chaney Middle School is shown. The quotes, coupled with surveys and presentations, are designed to reduce violence in the Youngstown school district.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Six Principles of Nonviolence will be a focal point of a student-led “Nonviolence Week” in the Youngstown city schools.
Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people.
Nonviolence seeks to win friendship and understanding.
Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice not people.
Nonviolence holds that suffering can educate and transform.
Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate.
Nonviolence believes that the universe is on the side of justice.
By Harold Gwin
YOUNGSTOWN — A small group of city high school students has organized “Nonviolence Week” Oct. 5-9, but they want the effort to spread beyond school buildings.
“We want to see a nonviolence week every year, in the city as well as the schools,” said Janae Ward, a sophomore at Chaney High School.
Toward that end, Courtney Martin, a junior at Youngstown Early College, wrote to Mayor Jay Williams and Youngstown City Council asking that the city declare Oct. 5-9 as nonviolence week in Youngstown.
Williams responded with a proclamation, and council passed a resolution in support of the students’ efforts.
Ward and Martin are part of the Youngstown contingent that went on the Sojourn to the Past journey last spring. The trip immerses students in a study of the civil- rights era, taking them to places in the South where civil-rights history was made and introducing them to many of the people who were instrumental in that movement.
Chaney junior A’Ja Glover, East High School junior Malcolm Brown, YEC junior Gregory Jones and Justin Kalinay, who graduated from Chaney this year, also made the spring Sojourn trip.
The experience includes making a commitment to organize some effort to make a positive change in their school and community when they return.
Past Sojourn participants form Youngstown have focused on voter registration in the city high schools.
That effort will continue, but this year’s Sojourn group opted to organize a nonviolence week, Jones recently told the city school board.
“We want to spread the word and become this district’s ‘beacon of hope’,” he said, drawing the phrase from the district’s mission statement.
They’ve been joined in their planning by Mallory Kimble, a Chaney senior who made the Sojourn journey as a sophomore.
They chose nonviolence because that was a key tenet of the civil- rights movement, Ward said.
The students met all summer to put the project together and went into action once school opened.
They put up “nonviolence walls“ and posters featuring quotes from famous people noted for their non-violent approach to human rights issues, Glover said.
During nonviolence week, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Six Principles of Nonviolence” will be featured in public address announcements in all schools, Kimble said.
On the final day of announcements, students in every city school will be asked to complete a brief survey asking them if they believe they have the power to make a difference, if they practice the principles of nonviolence and how their school would be different if everyone followed those principles.
The Sojourn students will analyze that data and then do a second survey later in the school year to see how things have changed, Ward said.
They’ve had special T-shirts printed with Martin Luther King Jrs.’s “Nonviolence or nonexistence” quote on the front and various nonviolence slogans on the backs.
The shirts will be sold to school staff and students at $7 each and Superintendent Wendy Webb has given everyone permission to wear those shirts during nonviolence week.
But the key focus of the week will be a series of nonviolence workshops targeting student councils, peer mediators and other student leader groups in the high schools.
Minnijean Brown-Trickey, one of the Little Rock Nine and one of those who actively interacts with students on the Sojourn journey, will be in Youngstown Oct. 4 to train the Sojourn students as workshop facilitators.
She will join them in conducting workshops Oct. 5 and 6, and they will then conduct their own Oct. 7-9.
“We want to see a change in our community and our schools,” Glover said.
Less arguing and fighting in school is a key aim, Kimble said.
The goal is to get the workshop participants to spread the word about nonviolence, Ward said.
“It’s not going to end on Oct. 9,” said Penny Wells, a retired city school teachers who runs the Sojourn program for the city schools as a volunteer. The plan is to make a lasting impact, and the students have worked very hard toward that end, she said.